He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barabbas.
"You must rot," he thought. "You will feed the rat and the mouse; the squirrel will come and gnaw you to line his nest; and the beetle and the fly will take you for a spawning-bed. You will serve no other end—since you are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, and try to bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, and which you are not, and never can be. For what man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of his ideals,—save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms to it vainly, and die?"
There came a soft shiver of the air, as though it were severed by some eager bird.
She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise on her face, a radiance in her eyes, more lustrous than any smile; her body tremulous and breathless from the impatient speed with which her footsteps had been winged; about her all the dew and fragrance of the night.
"Here is the gold!" she cried.
Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste.
"Gold?"
He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, astonished at her sudden presence there.
"Here is the gold!" she murmured, her voice rising swift and clear, and full of the music of triumph with which her heart was thrilling. "'A little gold,' you said, you remember?—'only a little.' And this is much. Take it—take it! Do you not hear?"
"Gold?" he echoed again, shaken from his trance of thought, and comprehending nothing and remembering nothing of the words that he had spoken in his solitude.