It was impossible that the mind should not shake off the present and go back to the time when the dust in the shrine before them lived, and moved, and spoke, and when the invisible Lord in their breasts was the visible Lord in the flesh, teaching, persuading, and suffering. The Lord in their hearts said to the apostle in the shrine: “Wilt thou also go away?” And the apostle answered him: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” And again Peter said: “Lord, thou shalt never wash my feet.” And Jesus answered him: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.” The Lord in their hearts was he who stood in the palace of the high-priest, bound and smitten upon the cheek, and Peter, standing by, denied that he knew him. The pallid lamps shone on the face of the Master turned for one reproachful look, and the red light of the coals burned up, as if the very fire blushed, in the face of the cowardly follower. They saw the seaside, where the risen Lord stood and called, and Peter, no longer a coward, but on fire with love and joy, flung himself into the sea to go to him. And yet again, in this memory which had become a presence and a voice, the Lord spoke to Peter: “Lovest thou me?” And Peter answered him once, and again, and, grieving, yet again: “Thou knowest that I love thee.” And Jesus said to him: “Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep.” O perfection of power and of obedience; for within this hour, which memory, unrolling again her shrunken scroll, showed to be eighteen centuries distant—within this hour both the sheep and the lambs had been fed! “I feel as though I had a garden in my heart,” Marion said to the _canonico_ as they went up into the church again. The two were walking slowly and last, and in speaking Marion bent and kissed the prelate’s hand. The hand held his a moment closely, and the _canonico_ replied: “Where the Tree of Life is, there is always a garden.” This conversation they had listened to between the Master and Peter followed them down the church, whose splendors seemed rather like virtues made visible than like any work of the hands of man. If they should ever be so lost and ungrateful as to leave this fold, to whom, indeed, should they go? And unless the Lord washed them from their sins, surely they could have no part with him. They still saw the lessening vision of the high-priest’s dim and solemn house as they passed down the church and out through the first portal; then the second fell behind them, and an Italian summer day caught them to its glowing breast. “It seems to me,” the Signora said, “as if we had just been ordained, and were being sent out as missionaries. Of course you go home to breakfast with us, Marion,” she added. “I was thinking of Fra Egidio this morning,” said Bianca softly, as they drove home through the hot sunshine. “He used to say, instead of 'I believe in God,’ 'I _know_ God.’”