hopeful
that it was nothing. She repeated her little games, and retold
her stories, and invented new ones, and listened with ever so
much pleasure to the songs she would have from Tirzah, while on
her own wasting lips the psalms of the singing king and their race
served to bring soothing of forgetfulness, and keep alive in them
both the recollection of the God who would seem to have abandoned
them--the world not more lightly or utterly.

Slowly, steadily, with horrible certainty, the disease spread,
after a while bleaching their heads white, eating holes in their
lips and eyelids, and covering their bodies with scales; then it
fell to their throats shrilling their voices, and to their joints,
hardening the tissues and cartilages--slowly, and, as the mother
well knew, past remedy, it was affecting their lungs and arteries
and bones, at each advance making the sufferers more and more
loathsome; and so it would continue till death, which might be
years before them.

Another day of dread at length came--the day the mother, under
impulsion of duty, at last told Tirzah the name of their ailment;
and the two, in agony of despair, prayed that the end might come
quickly.

Still, as is the force of habit, these so afflicted grew in time
not merely to speak composedly of their disease; they beheld the
hideous transformation of their persons as of course, and in despite
clung to existence. One tie to earth remained to them; unmindful of
their own loneliness, they kept up a certain spirit by talking
and dreaming of Ben-Hur. The mother promised reunion with him to
the sister, and she to the mother, not doubting, either of them,
that he was equally faithful to them, and would be equally happy of
the meeting. And with the spinning and respinning of this slender
thread they found pleasure, and excused their not dying. In such
manner as we have seen, they were solacing themselves the moment
Gesius called them, at the end of twelve hours' fasting and thirst.

The torches flashed redly through the dungeon, and liberty was come.
"God is good," the widow cried--not for what had been, O reader,
but for what was. In thankfulness for present mercy, nothing so
becomes us as losing sight of past ills.

The tribune came directly; then in the corner to which she had
fled, suddenly a sense of duty smote the elder of the women,
and straightway the awful warning--

"Unclean, unclean!"

Ah, the pang the effort to acquit herself of that duty