mother
too. Her name was Ahulah; her husband was a shoemaker. At the Gannath
Gate, where her home was, were two little children. She worshipped them,
and her husband she adored. Some hallucination, a tremor of the flesh, the
flush of wine, and there, circled by a leering crowd, she crouched, her
life disgraced, irrecoverable for evermore.

The charge was made, the usual question propounded. The Master had glanced
at her but once. He seemed to be looking afar, beyond the Temple and its
terraces, beyond the horizon itself. But the accusers were impatient. He
bent forward and with a finger wrote on the ground. The letters were
illegible, perhaps, yet the symbol of obliteration was in that dust which
the morrow would disperse. Again he wrote, but the charge was repeated,
louder, more impatiently than before.

Jesus straightened himself. With the weary indulgence of one to whom
hearts are as books, he looked about him, then to the dome above.

"Whoever is without sin among you," he declared, "may cast the first
stone."

When he looked again the crowd had slunk away. Only Ahulah remained, her
head bowed on her bare white arm. From the lateral chamber the priest
still peered, the carbuncle glistening on his lip.

"Did none condemn you?" the Master asked.

And as she sobbed merely, he added: "Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin
no more."

To the elders this was very discomforting. They had failed to unmask him
as a traitor to God, to Rome even, or yet as a demagogue defying the Law.
They did not care to question again. He had worsted them three times. Nor
could they without due cause arrest him, for there were the Pharisees.
Besides, a religious trial was full of risk, and the cooeperation of the
procurator not readily to be relied on. It was that cooeperation they
needed most, for with it such feeling as might be aroused would fall on
Rome and not on them. As for Pilate, he could put a sword in front of what
he said.

In their enforced inaction they got behind that wall of prejudice where
they and their kin feel most secure, and there waited, prepared at the
first opportunity to invoke the laws of their ancestors, laws so
cumbersome and complex that the Romans, accustomed to the clearest
pandects, had laughed and left them, erasing only the right to kill.

At last chance smiled. Into Jerusalem a rumor filtered that the Nazarene
they hated so had raised the dead, that the suburbs hailed him as the
Messiah, and tha