"I guess I know what I see with my own eyes, and hear with my own ears!" she retorted, angrily. "My father says they are a bad lot. People that go with publicans are just as unclean themselves. If you know so much more than everybody else, I'll not trouble myself to run after you with any more news. Mistaken, indeed!"
With her head held high, and her nose scornfully turned up, she jerked her little brother past him, and went quickly around the corner of the street.
The indignation of some of the rabbis knew no bounds. "It has turned out just as I predicted," said the scribe to Laban, at supper. "They are nothing but a set of gluttons and wine-bibbers!"
There was nothing else talked of during the entire meal. How Joel's blood boiled as he listened to their conversation! The food seemed to choke him. As they applied one coarse epithet after another to his friend Phineas, all the kindness and care this man had ever given him seemed to rise up before him. But when they turned on the Nazarene, all the stories Joel had heard in the carpenter's house of His gentle sinless childhood, all the tokens he had seen himself of His pure unselfish manhood, seemed to cry out against such gross injustice.
It was no light thing for a child to contradict the doctors of the Law, and, in a case of this kind, little less than a crime to take the stand Joel did.
But the memory of two faces gave him courage: that of Phineas as it had looked on him through all those busy happy hours in the carpenter's home; the other face he had seen but once, that day of healing in the synagogue,—who, having once looked into the purity of those eyes, the infinite tenderness of that face, could sit calmly by and raise no voice against the calumny of his enemies?
The little cripple was white to the lips, and he trembled from head to foot as he stood up to speak.
The scribe lifted up both hands, and turned to Laban with a meaning shrug of the shoulders. "To think of finding such heresy in your own household!" he exclaimed. "Among your own children!"
"He is no child of mine!" retorted Laban. "Nor shall he stay among them!" Then he turned to Joel.
"Boy, take back every word you have just uttered! Swear you will renounce this man,—this son of perdition,—and never have aught to say well of Him again!"