might from his ebony
chair. "Pilate, though you are a plebeian, why show yourself a slave?"

And Mary, with the strength of anger, brushed through the encircling
officials and towered before him, robed in wrath.

"Ah, permit me," he answered; "you are singularly unjust."

"Prove me so, and countermand the order that you gave."

As she spoke she adjusted her mantle, which had become disarranged, and
looked him from head to foot, measuring him as it were, and finding him,
visibly, very small.

Already the prisoner had been led away, and beyond, in the barracks, was
the whiz of jagged leather that lacerated, rebounded, and lacerated again.

"I will not," he answered. "What I have ordered, I have ordered. As for
you----"

There had come to her that look which sibyls have. "Pilate," she
interrupted, "you are powerful here, I know, but"--and her hand shot out
like an arrow from a bow--"over there vultures are circling; in your power
is a corpse. What the vultures scent, I see."

So abrupt and earnest was the gesture that unconsciously Pilate found
himself looking to where she seemed to point. He lowered his eyes in
vexation. Wrangling with a woman was not to his taste.

"There, there," he said, much as one might to a fretful child; "don't
throw stones."

"I have but one; it is Justice, and that I keep to hurl at you."

The procurator's mouth twitched ominously. "My dear," he said, "you are
too pretty to talk that way; it spoils the looks. Besides, I have no time
to listen."

"Tiberius has and will."

Pilate nodded; it was the third time he had heard the threat that day.

"There are many rooms in his palace," he answered, with covert
significance.

"Yes, I know it. There are many, as you say. But there is one I will
enter. On the door stands written The Future, and behind it, Pilate, is
your death."

The Roman, goaded to exasperation, sprang to his feet. An expression which
Antipas had used occurred to him. "Away with the hetaira," he cried; and
he was about, it may be, to order her to be tossed to the fierce wild
swine in the paddocks of the park when the prisoner and his guards
reappeared on the tessellated pavement, and Mary, already dragged from
him, was instantly forgot.

A tattered sagum, which had once been scarlet, but which had faded since,
hung, detained at the shoulder by a rusty buckle, and bordered by a
laticlave, loosely about his form. In his hand a bulrush swayed; on his
head was a twiste