t he proclaimed himself the Son of God. At once the
Sanhedrim reassembled. A political deliverer they might have welcomed, but
in a Messiah they had little faith. The very fact of his Messiahship
constituted him a claimant to the Jewish throne, and as such a pretender
with whom Pilate could deal. Moreover--and here was the point--to claim
divinity was to attack the unity of God. Of impious blasphemy there was no
higher form.

It were better, Annas suggested, that a man should die than that a nation
should perish--a truism, surely, not to be gainsaid.

That night it was decided that Jesus and Judaism could not live together;
a price was placed upon his head, and to the blare of four hundred
trumpets excommunication was pronounced.

Of all of these incidents save the last Mary had been necessarily aware.
In company with Johanna, the wife of Herod's steward, Mary, wife of
Clopas, and Salome, mother of Zebedee's children, she had heard him
reiterate the burning words of Jeremiah, and seen him purge the Temple of
its traffickers; she had heard, too, the esoteric proclamation, "Before
Abraham was, I am;" and she had seen him lash the Sadducees with
invective. She had been present when a letter was brought from Abgar
Uchomo, King of Edessa, to Jesus, "the good Redeemer," in which the
potentate prayed the prophet to come and heal him of a sickness which he
had, offering him a refuge from the Jews, and quaintly setting forth the
writer's belief that Jesus was God or else His Son. She had been present,
also, when the charge was made against Ahulah, and had comforted that
unfortunate in womanly ways. "Surely," she had said, "if the Master who
does not love you can forgive, how much more readily must your husband who
does!" Whereupon Ahulah had become her slave, tending her thereafter with
almost bestial devotion.

These episodes, one after another, she related to Martha; to Eleazer, her
brother; to Simon, Martha's husband; to anyone that chanced that way. For
it was then that the Master had bade her go to Bethany. For a little space
he too had forsaken Jerusalem. Now and then with some of his followers he
would venture in the neighborhood, yet only to be off again through the
scorched hollows of the Ghor before the sun was up.

These things it was that paraded before her as she lay on the floor of the
little room, felled by the hideousness of a threat that had sprung upon
her, abruptly, like a cheetah in the dark. To Martha an