ravine
in which was a brook, and a city of booths and tents, grazing camels and
fat-tailed sheep.

Through the pines and cypresses Mary passed down to where the olives were.
The brook sent a message to her; the blood that had flowed from the
sacrifices was in it, and in the fresh morning it reeked a little, as such
brooks do. It was here, she thought, the Master had been taken, and for a
second she stopped again. The sun now was rising behind her; the color of
the sky shifted. Beyond Jerusalem a mountain was melting in excesses of
vermilion, and the ravine that had been gray was assuming the tenderest
green. The star had disappeared, but from each tree broke the greeting of
a bird.

A rustle of the leaves near by startled her, and she looked about,
fearful, as women are, of some beast of prey. A white robe was there, a
white turban, and beneath it the swart face of one whom she had known.

To her eyes came massacres. "Judas!" she exclaimed, and looked up in that
roof of her world where day puts its blue and night puts its black.
"Judas!" she repeated. Her small hands clenched, and the rhymes of her
mouth grew venomous.

Then the woman spoke in her. "Why did you not kill me first?"

Judas swayed like an ox hit on the forehead. The motion distracted and
irritated her. "Can't you speak," she cried, "or does hell hold you,
tongue and all?"

He raised a hand as though he feared another blow. The gesture was so
human and yet so humble that Mary looked into his face. Time, which turns
the sweet-eyed girl into a withered spectre, must have touched him with
its thumb. His eyes were ringed and cavernous, his cheeks empty.

"You have heard, then?" he said; but he evinced no curiosity. He spoke
with the apathy of one who takes everything for granted, one with whom
fate is to have its will. "I have just come from there," he added, with a
backward gesture. "I never thought that such a thing could be. No, I swear
it, I never did." Then, in answer perhaps to some inner twinge, perhaps
also because of the expression of Mary's lips, he continued: "If there is
a new oath, one that has never been used before, prompt me, and I will
swear again, I never did. I thought----"

Mary interrupted him savagely: "There are ten kinds of hypocrisy. You have
nine of them; you will develop the tenth and invent a new one besides."

At this Judas made a pass with his hands and stared absently at the
ground. "Mary," he said, "life is a book which