“This is his record,” the voice of the implacable Judge continued; “not what I have attributed to him as secret thought, but words taken down as spoken by his own mouth.  Having committed his crime, he had the calm audacity—­to lay the blame on US....  Yes, here is the entry.  This is the statement verbatim:  ’It is the finger of God’.”

And Christ seemed to plead in an agony of grief still strove to lighten the punishment of the pitiful worm that he had deigned to call His brother man.  “Oh, he didn’t mean it.”

“He said it,” replied the Holy Ghost, dryly.

“But he didn’t think what he was saying—­he has been sorry for it ever since.”

“Yet, frankly,” said the Holy Ghost, “I can not see that he has made a single effort to put things straight, by removing the blame to the proper quarter—­that is, to himself.”

Nevertheless, Christ still pleaded, could not be silenced, must go on struggling to save this one man—­because He was the Savior of all men, because He was Christ.  He was there, certainly, infallibly, although quite invisible—­He was there, kneeling at the feet of the other Two, praying, weeping:—­He was there, filling Heaven with inconsolable woe because, although His myriad suns shone bright as when He lighted them and His universe swung steady and true in His measureless void, one microscopic speck of dirt only just big enough to hold immortal life was in danger of eternal death.

All these imaginations were absolutely real to Dale, an approximate conception of the truth which he could not doubt; and he thought:  “Need I wonder if I have not had the slightest glimpse of His face?  It is my doom.  Christ is cut off from me.  So far as human time counts, the communication was broken that afternoon when I was seeming to see him as he rode into Jerusalem and my hankerings after Norah seemed to snap the thread.

“I was judged at that moment.  It was my doom—­never more, here or there, to look upon His face.”

XXXV

It was the evening of another day; and Dale stood motionless in the ride, close to Kibworth Rocks.

The twilight was fading rapidly; clouds that had crept up from the east filled the sky, and presaged a dark and probably a stormy night.  Every now and then a gust of angry wind shook the tops of the fir trees; then the air was still and heavy again, and then the wind came back a little fiercer than before.  Dale felt sure that there would be rain presently, and he thought:  “If his ghost is really lying in there, it’ll get as wet as that first night when the showers washed away all the blood.”

He stared and listened, but to-night he could not fancy that he heard the dead man calling to him.  He could not invent any appropriate conversation.  It seemed to him that the ugly phantom was refusing to talk, that it had become sulky, or that it was pretending not to be there at all in order to effect a most insidious purpose.  Yes, that must be the explanation.  It wanted to entice and lure him off the ride—­to make him venture right in there among the rocks, so that he might be shown the thing that had haunted him in dreams.