"It is not–do you believe it?" she persisted, with strange terror waiting upon his answer. He moved uneasily but he answered the truth. It was superstition in him that spoke.
"Something in me says it is true," Philadelphus whispered.
She stood transfixed; then all her horror rose in her and cried out against the story.
"It can not be!" she cried. "See the misery and oppression, here, tenfold! Nothing has been done! Nobody heard of Him! He could not fail! What a blasphemy, what a travesty on His Word, to come and fulfil it not and go hence unnoticed! It can not be!"
"But, but–" he protested, somehow terrified by her denial, "only you have not heard. Everywhere are those who believe it and I saw–I saw–"
The growing violence of dissent on her face urged him to speak what his shamed and guilty tongue hesitated to pronounce.
"I saw in Ephesus one who saw Him; I saw in Patmos one who had reclined on His breast!"
"A–a–woman?" she whispered.
"No! No!" he returned in a panic. "A man, a prisoner, old and white and terrible! But it was in his youth! He told me! And the one in Ephesus, a red-beard, hunchbacked and half-blind and even more terrible than the first! He saw Him after He was dead!"
"Dead!" Her lips shaped the word.