nce, his own
face growing as inscrutable.

"We are strong and lonely--thou and I," he whispered at last. But the
Sphinx was silent.

(_Here endeth the First Scroll._)

SCROLL THE SECOND

XI

In a little Polish town, early one summer morning, two Jewish women,
passing by the cemetery, saw a spirit fluttering whitely among the
tombs.

They shrieked, whereupon the figure turned, revealing a beautiful girl
in her night-dress, her face, albeit distraught, touched unmistakably
with the hues of life.

"Ah, ye be daughters of Israel!" cried the strange apparition. "Help
me! I have escaped from the nunnery."

"Who art thou?" said they, moving towards her.

"The Messiah's Bride!" And her face shone. They stood rooted to the
soil. A fresh thrill of the supernatural ran through them.

"Nay, come hither," she cried. "See." And she showed them nail-marks
on her naked flesh. "Last night my father's ghostly hands dragged me
from the convent."

At this the women would have run away, but each encouraged the other.

"Poor creature! She is mad," they signed and whispered to each other.
Then they threw a mantle over her.

"Ye will hide me, will ye not?" she said, pleadingly, and her wild
sweetness melted their hearts.

They soothed her and led her homewards by unfrequented byways.

"Where are thy friends, thy parents?"

"Dead, scattered--what know I? O those days of blood!" She shuddered
violently. "Baptism or death! But they were strong. I see a Cossack
dragging my mother along with a thong round her neck. 'Here's a red
ribbon for you, dear,' he cries with laughter; they betrayed us to the
Cossacks, those Greek Christians within our gates--the Zaporogians
dressed themselves like Poles--we open the gates--the gutters run
blood--oh, the agonies of the tortured!--oh! father!"

They hushed her cries. Too well they remembered those terrible days of
the Chmielnicki massacres, when all the highways of Europe were
thronged with haggard Polish Jews, flying from the vengeance of the
Cossack chieftain with his troops of Haidamaks, and a quarter of a
million of Jewish corpses on the battle-fields of Poland were the
blunt Cossack's reply to the casuistical cunning engendered by the
Talmud.

"They hated my father," the strange beautiful creature told them, when
she was calmer. "He was the lessee of the Polish imposts; and in order
that he might collect the fines on Cossack births and marriages, he
kept the keys of the Greek c