done, and settling it well under the chin, he tied the other end of the
girdle to it and swung himself from the stone.

CHAPTER IX.

IX.

In the apartment of Claudia Procula, Mary and the wife of the procurator
stood face to face.

The apartment itself overlooked Jerusalem. Beneath was an open space tiled
with little oblong stones, red, yellow, and blue; the blue predominating.
On either side the colossal white wings of the palace stretched to a park,
very green in the sunlight, cut by colonnades in which fountains were, and
surrounded by a marble wall that was starred with turrets and fluttered
with doves. The Temple, which, from its cressets, radiated to the hills
beyond a glare of gold, was not as fair nor yet as vast as this. Within
its gates an army could manoeuvre; in its banquet-hall a cohort could have
supped. It was Herod's triumph, built subsequent to the Temple, to show
the world, perhaps, that to surpass a masterpiece he had only to conceive
another.

To it now and then, for a week or more, the procurator descended from his
residence by the sea. He preferred the latter; the day was freer there,
life less cramped. But during festival times, when the fanatic Jews were
apt to be excited and need the chill of a curb, it was well for him and
his soldiery to be on hand. And so on this occasion he had come, and with
him his wife, Claudia Procula, and the tetrarch Antipas, who had joined
them on the way.

Antipas and his retinue occupied the AEgrippeum, the north wing of the
palace, while in the Caesareum, the wing that leaned to the south, was
Pilate, his wife and body-guard.

And now on this clear morning the sweet-faced patrician, Claudia Procula,
with perfectly feminine curiosity was looking into the drawn features of
the Magdalen, and wondering whence her rumored charm could come.

"I will do my best," she said, at last, in answer to an anterior request.
And calling a servant, she wrote on a tablet a word for Pilate's eye.

Mary moved to the portico. The variegated tiles of the quadrangle were
nearly covered now. A flight of wide, low steps led to the main entrance
of the palace, and there a high seat of enamelled ebony had been placed.
In it Pilate sat, in his hand the staff of office. Beside him were his
assessors, members of his suite, and Calcol, a centurion. On one of the
steps Caiaphas stood, near him the elders of the