our boy is mad. What
have they done to him?" All her anticipations of horror were outpassed
by this.

Pain shadowed the sweet silence of Miriam's face as she stood in the
recess of the window.

"Mad! Oh, my mother, I am as one awakened. Rejoice, rejoice with me.
Let us sink ourselves in the universal joy, let us be at one with the
human race."

Rachel smiled tentatively through her tears. "Enough of this foolery,"
she said pleadingly. "It is the feast of Dedication, not of Lots.
There needs no masquerading to-day."

"Joseph, what ails thee?" interposed the sweet voice of Miriam. "What
hast thou done? Where hast thou been?"

"Art thou here, Miriam?" His eyes became conscious of her for the
first time. "Would thou hadst been there with me!"

"Where?"

"At St. Peter's. Oh, the heavenly music!"

"At St. Peter's!" repeated Rachel hoarsely. "Thou, my son Joseph, the
student of God's Law, hast defiled thyself thus?"

"Nay, it is no defilement," interposed Miriam soothingly. "Hast thou
not told us how our fathers went to the Sistine Chapel on Sabbath
afternoons?"

"Ay, but that was when Michel Angelo Buonarotti was painting his
frescoes of the deliverances of Israel. And they went likewise to see
the figure of our Lawgiver in the Pope's mausoleum. And I have even
heard of Jews who have stolen into St. Peter's itself to gaze on that
twisted pillar from Solomon's temple, which these infidels hold for
our sins. But it is the midnight mass that this Epicurean has been to
hear."

"Even so," said Joseph in dreamy undertones, "the midnight
mass--incense and lights and the figures of saints, and wonderful
painted windows, and a great multitude of weeping worshippers and
music that wept with them, now shrill like the passionate cry of
martyrs, now breathing the peace of the Holy Ghost."

"How didst thou dare show thyself in the cathedral?" whimpered Rachel.

"Who should dream of a Jew in the immense throng? Outside it was dark,
within it was dim. I hid my face and wept. They looked at the
cardinals in their splendid robes, at the Pope, at the altar. Who had
eyes for me?"

"But thy yellow cap, Joseph!"

"One wears not the cap in church, mother."

"Thou didst blasphemously bare thy head, and in worship?"

"I did not mean to worship, mother mine. A great curiosity drew me--I
desired to see with my own eyes, and hear with mine own ears, this
adoration of the Christ, at which my teachers scoff. But I was caught
up in