When he first began to feel as if some mysterious ailment was creeping upon him he kept himself out of Judith’s way as much as possible.  He dared not tell her that sometimes he could scarcely crawl from one place to another.  A miserable fevered weakness became his secret.  As the old woman took no notice of him except when he brought back his day’s earnings, it was easy to evade her.  One morning, however, she fixed her eyes on him suddenly and keenly.

“Why art thou so white?” she said, and caught him by the arm, whirling him toward the light.  “Art thou ailing?”

“No! no!” cried Zia.

She held him still for a few seconds, still staring.

“Thou art too white,” she said.  “I will have no such whiteness.  It is the whiteness of—­of an accursed thing.  Get thee gone!”

He went away, feeling cold and shaken.  He knew he was white.  One or two almsgivers had spoken of it, and had looked at him a little fearfully.  He himself could see that the flesh of his thin body was becoming an unearthly color.  Now and then he had shuddered as he looked at it because—­because—­There was one curse so horrible beyond all others that the strongest man would have quailed in his dread of its drawing near him.  And he was a child, a twelve-year-old boy, a helpless little hunchback mendicant.

When he saw the first white-and-red spot upon his flesh he stood still and stared at it, gasping, and the sweat started out upon him and rolled down in great drops.

“Jehovah!” he whispered, “God of Israel!  Thy servant is but a child!”

But there broke out upon him other spots, and every time he found a new one his flesh quaked, and he could not help looking at it in secret again and again.  Every time he looked it was because he hoped it might have faded away.  But no spot faded away, and the skin on the palms of his hands began to be rough and cracked and to show spots also.

In a cave on a hillside near the road where he sat and begged there lived a deathly being who, with face swathed in linen and with bandaged stumps of limbs, hobbled forth now and then, and came down to beg also, but always keeping at a distance from all human creatures, and, as he approached the pitiful, rattled loudly his wooden clappers, wailing out:  “Unclean!  Unclean!”

It was the leper Berias, whose hopeless tale of awful days was almost done.  Zia himself had sometimes limped up the hillside and laid some of his own poor food upon a stone near his cave so that he might find it.  One day he had also taken a branch of almond-blossom in full flower, and had laid it by the food.  And when he had gone away and stood at some distance watching to see the poor ghost come forth to take what he had given, he had seen him first clutch at the blossoming branch and fall upon his face, holding it to his breast, a white, bound, shapeless thing, sobbing, and uttering hoarse, croaking, unhuman cries.  No almsgiver but Zia had ever dreamed of bringing a flower to him who was forever cut off from all bloom and loveliness.