was left with the dead.

The momentary exertion, the bier, the sepulchre, the sight of the Christ
in his cerements, the brooding quiet--these things had roused her. Her mind
was nimbler, and thought more active. One by one the stars appeared. They
would vanish, she told herself, as her hopes had done. Only they would
reappear, and belief could not. It had come as a rainbow does, and
disappeared as vaporously, little by little, before the full glare of
might. For a minute, hours perhaps, she stood quite still, interrogating
the past in which so much had been, gauging the future in which so much
was to be. The one retreated, the other fled. Thoughts came to her
evanescently, and faded before they were wholly formed. At one moment she
was beckoning the unicorns from the desert, the winged lions from the
yonderland, commanding them to bear her to the home of some immense
revenge. At others she was asking her way of griffins, propounding the
problem to the Sphinx. But the unicorns and lions took flight, the
griffins spread their wings, the Sphinx fell asleep. There was no answer
to her appeal.

Behind the sepulchre the moon rose; it dropped a beam near by. There is
light somewhere, it seemed to say; and in that telegram from Above, she
thought of Rome. She remembered now, in Rome was Tiberius, and in him
Revenge. She smiled at her own forgetfulness. Yes, it was there. She would
go to him, she would exact reparation; there should be another
crucifixion. Pilate should be nailed to the cross, Judas on one side,
Caiaphas on the other. Only it would be at Rome where there was no
Passover to interfere with the torture they endured. Things were done
better there. Men were crucified, not with the head up, but with the feet;
and so remained, not for hours, but for days; and died, not of their
wounds alone, but of hunger too.

A chariot of dream caught her, and, borne across the intervening space,
she saw herself in a palace where there were gods and monsters, columns of
transparent quartz, floors of malachite, roofs of gold. And there, on a
dais, the Caesar lay. Behind him a fan, luminous as a peacock's tail,
oscillated to the tinkling of mysterious keys. In his crown was the
lividity of uncolored dawns, in his sceptre the dominion of the world. An
ulcer devoured his face, and in his ear a boy repeated the maxims of
Elephantis. Mary threw herself at his feet, her tears fell on them as rain
on leaves. "Vengeance," she implored; but