the west it fell steeply away. It was called
Guelgolta.

The sook in which Mary stood was affected by shoemakers. Against the
dwelling of one of them she leaned. The mantle was gone from her now, and
the olive robe had a rent, but the splendor of her hair fell unconfined,
the perils of her eyes had increased; yet in their depths where love had
been was hate. One arm lay along the resisting stone, the other hung at
her side; her face was turned to the palace, her thin nostrils quivering,
her breath coming and going with that spasmodic irregularity which the
consciousness of outrage brings. She laid it all to Judas; he must have
returned to Kerioth, she thought. The sook itself was silent, stirred
merely by some echo of the uproar in the palace beyond.

From a grilled lattice near by an old man peered out. He had the restless
eyes of a ferret, and a white beard that was very long. He too was looking
toward the palace. Now and then he muttered inaudibly in Aramaic to
himself. In the shadow of a neighboring house a woman appeared; he shook
at the lattice as an ape does at the bars of a cage, and spat a bestial
insult at her. The woman shrank back. Instinctively Mary turned. In the
retreating figure she recognized Ahulah, and at once, without conscious
effort, she divined that the dwelling against which she leaned was that of
Baba Barbulah, the husband of the woman whom the Master had declined to
condemn.

But other things possessed her--the outrage to the Christ, perplexity as to
how the trial would result, more remotely the indignity to herself, the
slurs of the tetrarch and of the procurator; and with them, sapping her
heart as fever might, was that thirst for reparation, unquenchable in its
intensity, which comes to those who have seen their own life wrecked and
its ideals dispersed.

Already Ahulah was forgot. On the wings of vagabond fancy she was in Rome,
demanding vengeance of Tiberius, wresting it from him by the sheer force
of entreaty, and with it exulting in the death-throes of the procurator.
Oh, to see his nails pulled out, his outer skin removed, his tongue
severed, his eyes seared with irons, his wrists slowly twisted till they
snapped! to hear him cry for mercy! to promise it and not fulfil!--dear
God, what joy was there!

From the alley into which Ahulah had shrunk a man issued. He was sturdy as
a bludgeon, and he had a growth of thick black hair that curled about an
honest face. In his hand was a bas