" she faltered.

"Yea; thy lips have wooed mine away from prayer, thine arms have drawn
me down from the steeps of righteousness. Thou hast made me unfaithful
to my bride, the Law. For nigh forty years I lived hard and lonely,
steeped my body in ice and snow, lashed myself--ay, lashed myself, I
who now fear the lash--till the blood ran from a dozen wounds, and
now, O God! O God! Woman, thou hast polluted me! I have lost the
divine spirit. It hath gone out from me; it will incarnate itself in
another, in a nobler. Once I was Messiah, now I am man."

"I?--I took from thee the divine spirit!"

She looked at him in all the flush of her beauty, grown insolent
again.

He sprang up, he fell upon her breast, he kissed her lips madly.

"Nay, nay, thou hast shown it me! Love! Love! 'tis Love that breathes
through all things, that lifts the burden of life. But for thee I
should have passed away, unknowing the glory of manhood. I am a man--a
man rejoicing in his strength! O my starved youth! why did I not
behold thee earlier?" Tears of self-pity rolled down his ashen cheek.
"O my love! my love! my lost youth! Give me back my youth, O God! Who
am I, to save? A man; yea, a man, glorying in manhood. Ah! happy are
they who lead the common fate of men, happy in love, in home, in
children; woe for those who would climb, who would torture and deny
themselves, who would save humanity? From what? If they have Love,
have they not all? It is God, it is the Kingdom. It is the Kingdom.
Come, let us live--I a man, thou a woman!"

"But a Mussulman!"

"What imports? God is everywhere. Was not our Maimonides--he at whose
tomb we worship in Tiberias--himself once a Mussulman? Did he not say
that if it be to save our lives naught is forbidden?"

He moved to take her in his arms, but this time it was she that drew
back. Her eyes flashed.

"Nay, as a man, I love thee not. Thou art divine or naught; God or
Impostor!"

"Melisselda!" She ignored his stricken cry.

"Nay, this ordeal hath endured long enough," she replied sternly.
"Confess, I have been proof."

"I am neither God nor Impostor," he said brokenly. "Ah! say not that
thou canst not love me as a man. When thou didst first come to bless
my life I had not yet declared myself Messiah."

"Who knows what I thought then? A wild girl, crazed by the convent,
by the blood shed before my childish eyes, I came to thee full of
lawless passions and fantastic dreams. But as I lived with thee,