. The messenger rode the whole journey in two
days, Sir, and you'll have to do the same, Sir, and to start at once if
you would see your father alive. If I would see my father alive! if I
would see my father alive! Joseph repeated, and, seizing Nicodemus by
the hand, he bade him farewell.

Let an escort be called together at once, he cried, and an hour later he
was on the back of a speedy dromedary riding through the night, his mind
whirling with questions which he did not put to the messenger, knowing
he could not answer any of them. And they rode on through that night and
next day, stopping but once to rest themselves and their animals--six
hours' rest was all he allowed himself or them. Six hours' rest for
them, for him not an hour, so full was his mind with questions. He rode
on, drinking a little, but eating nothing, thinking how his father's
life might be saved, of that and nothing else. Were they feeding him
with milk every ten minutes?--he could not trust nurses, nobody but
himself. Were they shouting in his ear, keeping him awake, as it were,
stimulating his consciousness at wane?

Once, and only once, while attending on his father did Joseph remember
that if his father died he would be free to follow Jesus: a shameful
thought that he shook out of his mind quickly, praying the while upon
his knees by the bedside that he might not desire his father's death.
As the thought did not come again, he assumed that his prayer was
granted, and when he returned to Jerusalem a month later (the new year
springing up all about him), immersed in a sort of sad happiness,
thanking God, who had restored his father to health (Joseph had left Dan
looking as if he would live to a hundred), a strange new thought came
into his mind and took possession of it: the promise given his father
only bound him during his father's lifetime; at his father's death he
would be free to follow Jesus; but the dead hold us more tightly than
the living, and he feared that his life would be always in his father's
keeping.

He was about his father's business in the counting-house; his father
seemed to direct every transaction, and, ashamed of his weakness, he
refrained from giving an order till he heard, or thought he heard, his
father's voice speaking through him, and when he returned to his
dwelling-house, over against the desert, it often seemed to him that if
he were to raise his eyes from the ashes in which some olive roots were
burning he would