"I care for nothing but the rescue of Judea!" she cried passionately.
"There is nothing left to me but that!"
"Then your ambitions are still for me. Alas, that the Messiah has come
and gone!"
It was his first reference to the great calamity he had told to her a
short time before. Its recurrence after she had resolved to regard it
as an impossible and blasphemous tale brought a chill to her heart.
"If I can prove to you that there is no hope for Jerusalem, what
then?" he asked suddenly.
She flung off the question with a gesture.
"Answer me. What then?"
"It is unimaginable what shall come to pass when God deserts His own."
"No need for imaginings. Look at Jerusalem and observe the fact. And
if we be abandoned, what fealty do we owe to a God that deserts us? If
you believe or not you are lost. Let us go out and live."
"If God has deserted us," she said scornfully, "how shall we be
happier elsewhere than here?"
"Every god to its own country. The Olympians are a jovial lot. I have
seen Joy's very self in heathendom."
She moved away but he rose and followed her.
"Whoever you are," he said in another tone, "your heritage of
innocence and earnestness is plain as an open scroll upon your face.
Nothing in all the world so appeals to the generosity in the heart of
a man as the purity of the woman who is pure.
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