"You speak riddles," I said.
"How so? Did you not tell Ben David—his horn be exalted—that you knew all concerning Bethulah? Then must you know that of her immaculacy will the Messiah be born, one ninth of Ab."
A flood of light burst upon me—mystic, yet clarifying; blinding, yet dissipating my darkness. My pistol drooped in my hand. My head swam with a whirl of strange thoughts, and Bethulah, already divine to me, took on a dazzling aureola, sailed away into some strange supernatural ether.
"Have we not been in exile long enough?" said the youngest. "Shall a godless stranger tamper with the hope of generations?"
"But whence this mad hope?" I said, struggling under the mystic obsession of his intensity.
"Mad?" began the first, his eyes spitting fire; but the younger interrupted him.
"Is not our saint the sole scion of the house of David? Is not his daughter the last of the race?"
"And what if she is?"
"Then who but she can be the destined mother of Israel's Redeemer?"
The goitred Chassid opened his lips and added, "If not now, when? as Hillel asked."