returns to the heart as the
leaf returns to the tree."

Mary looked at him vacantly. "What was he saying?" she wondered. From a
sea of grief she seemed to be passing onto an archipelago of dream.

"The next day I loitered in the neighborhood of the palace. You did not
appear. Toward evening I questioned a gardener. He said your name was
Mary, but he would tell me nothing else. On the morrow was the circus. I
made sure you would be there--with the tetrarch, I thought; and, that I
might be near the tribune, before the sun had set I was at the circus
gate. There were others that came and waited, but I was first. I remember
that night as never any since. I lay outstretched, and watched the moon;
your face was in it: it was a dream, of course. Yes, the night passed
quickly, but the morning lagged. When the gate was open, I sprang like a
zemer from tier to tier until I reached the tribune. There, close by, I
sat and waited. At last you came, and with you new perfumes and poisons.
Did you feel my eyes? they must have burned into you. But no, you gave no
heed to me. They told me afterward that Scarlet won three times. I did not
know. I saw but you. Once merely an abyss in which lightning was.

"Before the last race was done I got down and tried to be near the exit
through which I knew you must pass. The guards would not let me. The next
day I made friends with a sentry. He told me that you were Mirjam of
Magdala; that Tiberius wished you at Rome, and that you had gone with
Antipas to his citadel. In the wine-shops that night men slunk from me
afraid. A week followed of which I knew nothing, then chance disentangled
its threads. I found myself in a crowd at the base of a hill; a prophet
was preaching. I had heard prophets before; they were as torches in the
night: he was the Day. I listened and forgot you. He called me; I
followed. Until Sunday I had not thought of you again. But when you
appeared in the synagogue I started; and when you fainted, when I held you
in my arms and your eyes opened as flowers do, I looked into them and it
all returned. Mary, kiss me and kill me, but kiss me first."

"Yes, he is the Day."

Of the entire speech she had heard but that. It had entered perhaps into
thoughts of her own with which it was in unison, and she repeated the
phrase mechanically, as a child might do. But now as he ceased to speak,
perplexed, annoyed too at the inappositeness of her reply, she came back
from the infinite in wh