"It is not--do you believe it?" she persisted, with strange terror waiting upon his answer. He moved uneasily but he answered the truth. It was superstition in him that spoke. "Something in me says it is true," Philadelphus whispered. She stood transfixed; then all her horror rose in her and cried out against the story. "It can not be!" she cried. "See the misery and oppression, here, tenfold! Nothing has been done! Nobody heard of Him! He could not fail! What a blasphemy, what a travesty on His Word, to come and fulfil it not and go hence unnoticed! It can not be!" "But, but--" he protested, somehow terrified by her denial, "only you have not heard. Everywhere are those who believe it and I saw--I saw--" The growing violence of dissent on her face urged him to speak what his shamed and guilty tongue hesitated to pronounce. "I saw in Ephesus one who saw Him; I saw in Patmos one who had reclined on His breast!" "A--a--woman?" she whispered. "No! No!" he returned in a panic. "A man, a prisoner, old and white and terrible! But it was in his youth! He told me! And the one in Ephesus, a red-beard, hunchbacked and half-blind and even more terrible than the first! He saw Him after He was dead!" "Dead!" Her lips shaped the word. "They--yes! He was crucified!" Her lips parted as if to speak the word, but her mind failed to grasp it certainly. She stood moveless in an actual pain of horror. "But He rose again from the dead," he persisted, "and left the earth to its own devices hereafter. And so behold Jerusalem! "And there was one woman," he added, "who had been a scarlet woman. She had anointed His feet with precious oil and wiped them with her hair. And I saw her also--I sought them all out, because they could do miracles and foretell events. Thousands upon thousands believe in them." "Crucified!" she whispered. "They say," he went on, "that He pronounced judgment on Jerusalem and that it now cometh to pass!" The accumulated effect of the calamitous recital was to stun her. She gazed at him with unintelligent eyes, and her lips moved without speaking. For one reared in constant contemplation of God's nearness to His children, acquainted with divine politics, divine literature and divine law, cut off from the world and devoted wholly to religion, the story of a divine tragedy carried with it the full force of its fearful import. Philadelphus' narrative meant to her the crumbling of earth and the effacement of Heaven. She cried wildly her unbelief when words returned to her. But under the fury of her denunciation, unconsciously directed against the conviction that the story was true, she felt her hope of a restored Kingdom of David wavering toward a fall.