k-bones were
remarkably high, and receded so quickly towards his pointed chin that
his cheeks were little more than hollows. His eyes were dry and burning,
flashing here and there as though the man himself were continually
oppressed by some furtive fear. His thick black hair was short cropped,
his forehead high and intellectual. He was a strange figure, indeed,
in such a gathering, and his companion only served to accentuate the
anachronisms of his appearance. She was, above all things, a woman of
the moment--fair, almost florid, a little thick-set, with tightly-laced,
yet passable figure. Her eyes were blue, her hair light-colored. She
wore magnificent furs, and, as she threw aside her boa, she disclosed a
mass of jewelry around her neck and upon her bosom, almost barbaric in
its profusion and setting.

"What an extraordinary couple!" Lady Maxwell whispered.

Bernadine smiled.

"The man looks as though he had stepped out of the Old Testament," he
murmured.

Lady Maxwell's interest was purely feminine, and was riveted now upon
the jewelry worn by the woman. Bernadine, under the mask of his habitual
indifference, which had easily reassumed, seemed to be looking away out
of the restaurant into the great square of a half-savage city, looking
at that marvelous crowd, numbered by their thousands, even by their
hundreds of thousands, of men and women whose arms flashed out toward
the snow-hung heavens, whose lips were parted in one chorus of rapturous
acclamation; looking beyond them to the tall, emaciated form of the
bare-headed priest in his long robes, his wind-tossed hair and wild
eyes, standing alone before that multitude, in danger of death, or
worse, at any moment--their idol, their hero. And again, as the memories
came flooding into his brain, the scene passed away, and he saw the
bare room with its whitewashed walls and blocked-up windows; he felt
the darkness, lit only by those flickering candles. He saw the white,
passion-wrung faces of the men who clustered together around the rude
table, waiting; he heard their murmurs, he saw the fear born in their
eyes. It was the night when their leader did not come.

Bernadine poured himself out a glass of wine and drank it slowly. The
mists were clearing away now. He was in London, at the Savoy Restaurant,
and within a few yards of him sat the man with whose name all Europe
once had rung--the man hailed by some as martyr, and loathed by others
as the most fiendish Juda