“Or else a supernatural man.  Would I could manage men by the fall of my foot, as he does.  I should have Jerusalem’s fealty by to-morrow night.  But it was near early morning that the other incident occurred.  That was of another nature.  We stumbled upon a pair huddled in the shadow of a building.  We stumbled upon many figures in shadows, but one of these murmured a name that I heard once in the hills hereabout, and I had profited by that name, so I halted.  It was an old man, starved and weary and ill; with him was a gray ghost of a creature with long white hair, that seemed to be struck with terror the instant it heard my voice.  At first I thought it was a withered old woman, but it proved to be a man—­somehow seeming young in spite of the snow-white hair and wasted frame.  I had them taken up, the gray ghost resisting mightily, and carried to my burrow where they now lie.  They eat; they take up space; they add nothing to my cause.  But I can not turn them out.  The old man disarms me by that name.”

He looked down at her with softening eyes.

“And the shepherd held thy hand?” he said softly.  She turned upon him in astonishment.  How much of joy and surprise and hope he could bring in a single visit, she thought.  Now, behold he had met that same delightsome child that had passed like a dash of sunlight across her dark day.

“Did you meet the shepherd of Pella?” she asked.  Instant deduction supplied her the name that had moved him to compassion.  “And did he serve you in the name of his Prophet?” she whispered.

“He saved my life in the name of his Christ, but was tender of me in thy name,” he replied.

“His is a sweet apostasy,” she ventured bravely, “if it be his apostasy that made him kind.  And I—­I owe him much, that he repaired that for which I feel at fault.”

He smiled at her and stroked her hand once, soothingly.

“Let us not remember blames or injury.  It damages my happiness.  But of this apostasy that the shepherd preached me.  I passed the stones of the Palace of Antipas to-day, a ruin, black and shapeless.  Thought I, where is the majesty of order and the beauty of strength that was this place?  And then,” his voice fell to a whisper, “beshrew the boy’s tattle, I said, the footprints of his Prophet before the throne of Herod are erased.”

“Even then,” she whispered when he paused, “you do not forget!”

“No!  Why, these streets, that should ring for me with the footsteps of all the great from the days of David, are marked by the passage of that Prophet.  I might forget that Felix and Florus and Gessius were legates in that Roman residence, but I do not fail to remember that they took that Prophet before Pilate there.  By my soul, the street that leads north hath become the way of the Cross, and there are three crosses for me on the Hill of the Skull!”

She looked at him gravely and with alarm.  What was it in this history of the Nazarene which won aristocrats and shepherds alike?  She would see from this man if there were indeed any truth in the story that Philadelphus had told her.