and evidently in full activity. Round the door there
was a knot of workmen lounging. It was a mild moonlit April night, and
the air was pleasant. Several of them had copies of _Faith and Fools_,
and were showing the week's woodcut to those about them, with chuckles
and spirts of laughter.

Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and stirred by a
sudden impulse turned into the shop beyond, and asked for the paper. The
woman handed it to him, and gave him his change with a business-like
_sangfroid_, which struck on his tired nerves almost more painfully than
the laughing brutality of the men he had just passed.

Directly he found himself in another street he opened the paper under a
lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll
emanating from Mary Magdalene's mouth, in particular, containing
obscenities which cannot be quoted here.

Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve quivering.

'This is Wednesday in Passion week,' he said to himself. 'The day after
to-morrow is Good Friday!'

He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found himself
within the City, where the streets were long since empty and silent. But
he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts were in the distant East,
among the flat roofs and white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany,
the steep streets and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with
the bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical
perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum
and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later Jerusalem
preaching--all these various images sprang into throbbing poetic life
within him. That anything in human shape should be found capable of
dragging this life and this death through the mire of a hideous and
befouling laughter! Who was responsible? To what cause could one trace
such a temper of mind towards such an object--present and militant as
that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout
modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love
Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though he
could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately
discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from
simplicity and verity?--is it the last and most terrible illustration of
a great axiom: '_Faith has a judge--in truth_'?

He went home and