Who are those extraordinary persons?... I have never seen so many cripples, vagrants and evil-smelling sick people gathered together.... What do they want with you?... I was told that you were living in the midst of uncouth creatures, the oldest, the ugliest, the dirtiest and the most pestilential of those Jews whom you mocked so pleasantly in the house of the wise Silanus; but I could not have believed that they were so intimate with you as this.... However, that no longer concerns me. But I told you that we should meet again before long.... Appius informed me that you had been looking for me in the Roman quarter. I left everything to hasten at your first summons. I knew what was happening and I was biding my time.... MARY MAGDALENE How good and generous you are!... How reassuring and comforting your presence and your smile!... Those others ... if you only knew!... They were trembling like the reeds of which our Master speaks; and I was helpless and dying with shame.... But I knew that you would come back to us; and now this is you, your arms, your breast.... It seems to me that Rome in her entirety is protecting us and that your arms, which can do all things, cannot abandon him.... VERUS They will not abandon you, Magdalene. The rest depends upon yourself alone.... I am good and generous, perhaps, but in my own manner; and we must understand each other.... So they have arrested him in whom you take so lively an interest, as I told you that they would?... MARY MAGDALENE They have not only arrested him: all the menials of the Temple, the grooms, the herds, the meanest scullions in the kitchens rushed at him, insulted, flouted and ill-treated him.... And, as they were afraid, as they were too cowardly to venture it alone, they made the Roman soldiers help them!... VERUS I know.... But had we not best be brief and to the point?... MARY MAGDALENE Yes, we have no time to lose.... VERUS Even so. It is not now a question of arrest nor of more or less justifiable ill-usage, but of imminent death. I have seen the Procurator Pontius Pilate. MARY MAGDALENE Good. What did he say?... VERUS I found him anxious, perplexed, at a loss. He is a mild, irresolute man, an enemy to quarrels and violence. He had to choose between the inevitably bloody revolt of the priests and their sectaries and the sacrifice of an agitator who was unquestionably troublesome and dangerous, but who has not, perhaps, incurred the death penalty in the eyes of Roman law and justice. I spoke according to my duty and conscience. He did not hesitate. He chose the more humane and wiser course. And, as I am the armed guardian responsible for the Roman peace, he gave the fate of your Nazarene into my hands. However, I must admit that, before our interview, I had purposely allowed events to take the course they did.... MARY MAGDALENE He is saved! I was sure of it! And how right I was to fear nothing and to hope all things in turning to you!... VERUS