nce.

"And what do you think?"

Peter whispered with awe and gladness--

"I think that He is the son of the living God."

"Then why do you ask? What can Judas tell you, whose father was a goat?"

"But do you love Him? You do not seem to love any one, Judas."

And with the same strange malignity, Iscariot blurted out abruptly and
sharply: "I do."

Some two days after this conversation, Peter openly dubbed Judas
"my friend the octopus"; but Judas awkwardly, and ever with the same
malignity, endeavoured to creep away from him into some dark corner, and
would sit there morosely glaring with his white, never-closing eye.

Thomas alone took him quite seriously. He understood nothing of
jokes, hypocrisy or lies, nor of the play upon words and thoughts, but
investigated everything positively to the very bottom. He would often
interrupt Judas' stories about wicked people and their conduct with
short practical remarks:

"You must prove that. Did you hear it yourself? Was there any one
present besides yourself? What was his name?"

At this Judas would get angry, and shrilly cry out, that he had seen
and heard everything himself; but the obstinate Thomas would go on
cross-examining quietly and persistently, until Judas confessed that
he had lied, or until he invented some new and more probable lie, which
provided the others for some time with food for thought. But when Thomas
discovered a discrepancy, he would immediately come and calmly expose
the liar.

Usually Judas excited in him a strong curiosity, which brought about
between them a sort of friendship, full of wrangling, jeering, and
invective on the one side, and of quiet insistence on the other.
Sometimes Judas felt an unbearable aversion to his strange friend, and,
transfixing him with a sharp glance, would say irritably, and almost
with entreaty--

"What more do you want? I have told you all."

"I want you to prove how it is possible that a he-goat should be your
father," Thomas would reply with calm insistency, and wait for an
answer.

It chanced once, that after such a question, Judas suddenly stopped
speaking and gazed at him with surprise from head to foot. What he saw
was a tall, upright figure, a grey face, honest eyes of transparent
blue, two fat folds beginning at the nose and losing themselves in a
stiff, evenly-trimmed beard. He said with conviction:

"What a stupid you are, Thomas! What do you dream about--a tree, a wall,
or a donkey?"

Tho