“This Caiaphas, I have heard of him as high priest, then who is this Hanan?” I asked.

“The real high priest, a cunning fox,” Pilate explained.  “Caiaphas was appointed by Gratus, but Caiaphas is the shadow and the mouthpiece of Hanan.”

“They have never forgiven you that little matter of the votive shields,” Miriam teased.

Whereupon, as a man will when his sore place is touched, Pilate launched upon the episode, which had been an episode, no more, at the beginning, but which had nearly destroyed him.  In all innocence before his palace he had affixed two shields with votive inscriptions.  Ere the consequent storm that burst on his head had passed the Jews had written their complaints to Tiberius, who approved them and reprimanded Pilate.

I was glad, a little later, when I could have talk with Miriam.  Pilate’s wife had found opportunity to tell me about her.  She was of old royal stock.  Her sister was wife of Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis and Batanaea.  Now this Philip was brother to Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, and both were sons of Herod, called by the Jews the “Great.”  Miriam, as I understood, was at home in the courts of both tetrarchs, being herself of the blood.  Also, when a girl, she had been betrothed to Archelaus at the time he was ethnarch of Jerusalem.  She had a goodly fortune in her own right, so that marriage had not been compulsory.  To boot, she had a will of her own, and was doubtless hard to please in so important a matter as husbands.

It must have been in the very air we breathed, for in no time Miriam and I were at it on the subject of religion.  Truly, the Jews of that day battened on religion as did we on fighting and feasting.  For all my stay in that country there was never a moment when my wits were not buzzing with the endless discussions of life and death, law, and God.  Now Pilate believed neither in gods, nor devils, nor anything.  Death, to him, was the blackness of unbroken sleep; and yet, during his years in Jerusalem, he was ever vexed with the inescapable fuss and fury of things religious.  Why, I had a horse-boy on my trip into Idumaea, a wretched creature that could never learn to saddle and who yet could talk, and most learnedly, without breath, from nightfall to sunrise, on the hair-splitting differences in the teachings of all the rabbis from Shemaiah to Gamaliel.

But to return to Miriam.

“You believe you are immortal,” she was soon challenging me.  “Then why do you fear to talk about it?”

“Why burden my mind with thoughts about certainties?” I countered.

“But are you certain?” she insisted.  “Tell me about it.  What is it like—­your immortality?”

And when I had told her of Niflheim and Muspell, of the birth of the giant Ymir from the snowflakes, of the cow Andhumbla, and of Fenrir and Loki and the frozen Jotuns—­as I say, when I had told her of all this, and of Thor and Odin and our own Valhalla, she clapped her hands and cried out, with sparkling eyes: