"Thou speakest strangely, as if thy trouble hath gone to thy head."
"Fear not for my head, Martha, since from thy lips did I hear the strange tale that did give rise to my thinking. Didst thou not tell of a kinsman of Joel who put his wife in a new tomb and sealed the door with a great stone? And what was it that did leap into their arms when, after three years, they rolled the stone away? Was it not the bones of the woman who had been buried alive? And had she not stood with her lips against the stone crying for help until she starved? Aye, and she stood on, waiting for those to come who should learn from her bones what her lips had prayed to tell. Didst thou not repeat me this, my Martha, even to the screams of those into whose arms the woman's bones did fall?"
"Thou sayest truly. But save this one, my ears have not heard so gruesome a tale."
"What might happen once, might come to pass again. Who knoweth if there might not be others—who knoweth?"
"Did not the physician say Lazarus is dead?"
"Yea, the physician."
"And the Rabbi?"
"Yea, the Rabbi."
"And did not the chief mourners whose business is ever with the dead, speak him dead?"
"Yea, the chief mourners."