ad 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 toward 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 lay awake half the light pondering. If he could but
pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his
youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are
alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will
not bear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more
painfully from exercising.

The next night was a storytelling night. He spent it in telling the
legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait
a moment, and there and then--with the tender, imaginative Franciscan
atmosphere, as it were, still about t