and could not close the door upon her.  The moment of her discovery of this came early, and it is only she, perhaps, who could tell how the strange bond wove itself that drew her being—­the Magdalene’s—­to the priest who sat behind a lady in swansdown and chiffon in the upper box nearest to the stage on the right.  The beginnings of such things are untraceable, but the fact may be considered in connection with this one that Hamilton Bradley, who represented, as we have been told he would, the Chief Character, did it upon lines very recognisably those of the illustrations of sacred books, very correct as to the hair and beard and pictured garment of the Galilean; with every accent of hollow-eyed pallor and inscrutable remoteness, with all the thin vagueness, too, of a popular engraving, the limitations and the depression.  Under it one saw the painful inconsistency of the familiar Hamilton Bradley of other presentations, and realised with irritation, which must have been tenfold in Hilda, how he hated the part.  Perhaps this was enough in itself to send her dramatic impulse to another focus, and the strangeness of the adventure was a very thing she would delight in.  Whatever may be said about it, while yet the hideousness of the conception and display of a woman’s natural passion for the man Christ Jesus was receding from Arnold’s mind before the exquisite charm and faithfulness of the worshipping Magdalene, he became aware that in some special way he sat judging and pitying her.  She had hardly lifted her eyes to him twice, yet it was he, intimately he, who responded, as if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of her love.  As he watched and knew his lips tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of how the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering and transported thus.  The poverty of the play faded out; he became almost unaware of the pinchbeck and the fustian of Patullo’s invention and its insufferable mixture with the fabric of which every thread was precious beyond imagination.  He looked down with tender patience and compassion upon the development of the woman’s intrigue in the palace, through the very flower of her crafts and guiles, to save him who had transfigured her from the hands of the rabble and the high priests; he did not even shrink from the inexpressibly grating note of the purified Magdalene’s final passionate tendering of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured Pilate as the price of His freedom, and when at the last she wept at His feet, where He was bound waiting for His cross, and wrapped them, in the agony of her abandonment, in the hair of her head, the priest’s lips almost moved in words other than those the playwright had given his Christ to say—­words that told her he knew the height and the depth of her sacrifice