p, strong and assertive. The far-off shadowy figures of
those base-born ancestors of his who had prayed in the ancient
synagogues in the days before the Great Expulsion, shook off the mists
of a hundred years and stood forth solid, heroic, appealing.

And then recalling the dearth of bitter herbs in the market-place on
what he now understood was the eve of Passover, he had a sudden
intuition of a great secret brotherhood of the synagogue ramifying
beneath all the outward life of Church and State; of a society
honeycombed with Judaism that persisted tenaciously and eternally
though persecution and expulsion, not in stray units, such as the
Inquisition ferreted out, but in ineradicable communities. It was
because the incautious physician had mistaken him for a member of the
brotherhood of Israel that he had ventured upon his now transparent
jests. "Good God!" thought Da Costa, sickening as he remembered the
_auto-da-fe_ he had seen at Lisbon in his boyhood, when De la Asuncao,
the Franciscan Jew monk, clothed in the Sanbenito, was solemnly burnt
in the presence of the king, the queen, the court, and the mob. "What
if 'twas my tale to Frei Jose that led to Dom Diego's arrest! But no,
that were surely evidence too trivial, and ambiguous at the best." And
he put the painful suspicion aside and hastened to shut himself up in
his study, sending down an excuse to his mother and brother by Pedro,
the black slave-boy.

In the beautiful house on the hilltop, built by Gabriel's grandfather,
and adorned with fine panelings and mosaics of many-colored woods from
the Brazils, this study, secluded by its position at the head of the
noble staircase, was not the least beautiful room. The floor and the
walls were of rich-hued tiles, the arched ceiling was ribbed with
polished woods to look like the scooped-out interior of a half-orange.
Costly hangings muffled the noise of the outer world, and large
shutters excluded, when necessary, the glare of the sun. The rays of
Reason alone could not be shut out, and in this haunt of peace the
young Catholic had known his bitterest hours of unrest. Here he now
cast himself feverishly upon the perusal of the Old Testament,
neglected by him, as by the Church.

"This book, at least, must be true," ran his tumultuous thoughts. "For
this Testament do both creeds revere that wrangle over the later." He
had a Latin text, and first he turned to the fifty-third chapter of
Isaiah, and, reading it criticall