There was no light in her eyes now; from luminous sapphires they had become pebbles, dull orbs of lapis-lazuli. When she spoke her voice creaked and wheezed "If your Master lived to-day, I would go to Palestine!" she said, looking very directly at him.
"What on earth for?" he asked blankly.
"Can you not understand?"
Her look was that of Medusa, and flickering lights came and went in her half-lifeless eyes. Their glare, rather than the toneless notes of her voice, made him faintly understand. The chosen passage out of St. Matthew, taken in conjunction with her earlier chatter of miracles, and her late reference to Palestine, engendered in his brain a horrible, a terrible, an impossible thought. And yet----
"What are you talking about?" he asked harshly.
The cry of a soul on fire broke on his ears. "You brute, when I suffer so! Does it need words?"
"Does what need words?"
She dashed her hand on the open page of the Bible. "This--this!"
"Augh!" He rose and sat down, with cold hands and a white face. The meaning of what she meant crashed like the blow of a bludgeon, and his brain spun to the shock "Leah!" he heard himself say, in a far-away voice like a telephone whisper. Then he stopped to stare at the quiet woman who sat upright, with rigid features and tightly clasped hands. "Leah," he muttered again, and some indefinable feeling made his hair crisp at the roots.
"Yes!" That was all she said, and her lips hardly moved in the saying.