pening gates of life.
The Infinite is mine. Mary, come with me, and you shall measure it."

When Mary ventured to look again the vision had gone. They had all gone
now. She had made no effort to detain them. They were tempters of which
she was freed, in which she believed, and which were real to her. The wall
through which they had come and departed was vague and in the darkness
remote, but presently it dissolved again, and afar in the beckoning
distance was one breathing a soul into decrepit rites. "Come unto me, all
ye that sorrow and are heavy-laden," she heard him say; and, as with a
great sob of joy she rose to that gracious summons, night seized her. When
she awoke, a newer dawn had come.

CHAPTER IV.

IV.

In the gardens of the palace the tetrarch mused. The green parasols of the
palms formed an avenue, and down that avenue now and then he looked. Near
him a Syrian bear, quite tame, with a sweet face and tufted silver fur,
gambolled prodigiously. Up and down a neighboring tree two lemurs chased
with that grace and diabolic vivacity which those enchanting animals alone
possess. Ringed-horned antelopes, the ankles slender as the stylus, the
eyes timid and trustful, pastured just beyond; and there too a black-faced
ape, irritated perhaps by the lemurs, turned indignant somersaults, the
tender coloring of his body glistening in the sun.

"It is odd that Pahul does not return," the tetrarch reflected; and then,
it may be for consolation's sake, he plunged his face in a jar of wine
that had been drained, in accordance with a recipe of Vitellius, through
cinnamon and calamus, and drank abundantly.

Long since he had deserted Machaerus. The legends that peopled its
corridors had beset him with a sense of reality which before they had
never possessed. The leaves of the baaras glittered frenetically in the
basalt, and in their spectral light a phantom with eyes that cursed came
and went. At night he had drunk, and in the clear forenoons he paced the
terrace fancying always that there, beyond in the desert, Aretas prowled
like a wolf. Machaerus was unhealthy; men had gone mad there, others had
disappeared entirely. It was a haunt of echoes, of memories, of ghosts
also, perhaps too of reproach. And so, with his court, he returned to his
brand-new Tiberias, where the air was serener, and nature laughed.

And yet in the gardens that leaned to t