done, and she ceased to suffer. The
departing hierarchy, the dispersing mob, retreating before encroaching
night, left her unimpressed. To her the setting sun was Christ.

The soldiers passed. She did not see them. Calcol called to her. She did
not hear. The women had gone from her; she did not notice it. She stood as
a cataleptic might, her eyes on the cross. Once only, when the Christ had
uttered his despairing cry, she too had cried in her despair. In the roar
of the mob the cry was lost as a stone tossed in the sea. Since then she
had been dumb, sightless also, existing, if at all, unconsciously, her
life-springs nourished by death.

Though she gazed at the cross, she had ceased to distinguish it. A little
group that had reached it before the soldiery left had been unmarked by
her. On the platform of her dream a serpent had emerged. In its coils were
her immortal hopes. It was that she saw, and that alone. Those moments of
agony in which the imagination oscillates between the past and the future,
devouring the one, fumbling the other, had been endured, and resignation
failed to bring its balm. She had believed with a faith so firm that now
in its demolition there was nothing left--an abyss merely, where light was
not.

A hand touched her, and she quivered as a leaf does at the wing of a bird.
"Mary, come with us," some one was saying; "we are taking him to a tomb."

Just beyond were men and women whom she knew. Joseph of Haramathaim, a
close follower of the Master; Nikodemon, the richest man in all Judaea;
Johanna, Mary Clopas, Salome, Bernice, and the servants of the opulent
Jew. It was Ahulah who had touched her; and as Mary started she saw before
her a coffin which the others bore.

"Come with us," Ahulah repeated; and Mary crossed the intervening ridge to
where the gardens were and the tombs she had already passed.

At the door of a sepulchre the brief procession halted. Within was a room,
a little grotto furnished with a stone slab and a lamp that flickered,
surmounted by an arch. The coffin, placed on the slab, routed a bat that
flew to the arch, and a lizard that scurried to a crevice. In the coffin
the Christ lay, his head wrapped in a napkin, the body wound about by
broad bands of linen that were secured with gum and impregnated with
spices and with myrrh. The odor of aromatics filled the tomb. The bat
escaped to the night. A stone was rolled before the opening, the brief
procession withdrew, and Mary