d to the others on
one subject alone had she been silent, and now at the moment it dominated
all else.

From the day on which she joined the little band to whom the future was to
give half of this world and all of the next, Judas had been ever at her
ear. As a door that opens and shuts at the will of a hand, his presence
and absence had barred the vistas or left them clear. At first he had
affected her as a scarabaeus affects the rose. She knew of him, and that
was all. When he spoke, she thought of other things. And as the blind
remain unawakened by the day, he never saw that where the wanton had been
the saint had come. To him she was a book of ivory bound in gold, whose
contents he longed to possess; she was a book, but one from which whole
chapters had been torn, the preface destroyed; and when his increasing
insistence forced itself upon her, demanding, obviously, countenance or
rebuke, she walked serenely on her way, disdaining either, occupied with
higher things. It was of the Master only that she appeared to think. When
he spoke, it was to her as though God really lived on earth; her eyes
lighted ineffably, and visibly all else was instantly forgot. At that time
her life was a dream into whose charmed precincts a bat had flown.

These things, gradually, Judas must have understood. In Mary's eyes he may
have caught the intimation that to her now only the ideal was real; or the
idea may have visited him that in the infinite of her faith he disappeared
and ceased to be. In any event he must have taken counsel with himself,
for one day he approached her with a newer theme.

"I have knocked on the tombs; they are dumb."

Mary, with that grace with which a woman gathers a flower when thinking of
him whom she loves, bent a little and turned away.

"Have you heard of the Buddha?" he asked. "Babylon is peopled with his
disciples. One of them met Jesus in the desert, and taught him his belief.
It is that he preaches now, only the Buddha did not know of a heaven, for
there is none."

And he added, after a pause: "I tell you I have knocked on the tombs;
there is no answer there."

With that, as a panther falls asleep, his claw blood-red, Judas nodded and
left her to her thoughts.

"In Eternity there is room for everything," she said, when he came to her
again.

"Eternity is an abyss which the tomb uses for a sewer," he answered. "Its
flood is corruption. The day only exists, but in it is that freedom which
waves