The City of Delight

Laodice halted abruptly in her appeal, breathless with feeling.

The amusement had gone out of his face and his expression was one of

mingled discomfort and surprise at her speech.

"Since you are a thinking woman," he answered, "I must answer you

soberly. Even I, expecting disorder and uproar in Jerusalem, when I

came from Ephesus, was not prepared for this chaos! Never was such a

time! Order is not possible in this extreme. It is unthinkable.

Nothing human can save Jerusalem!"

She laid her hand upon him.

"Nothing human!" she repeated quickly. "Seest not that this is the

time of the Messiah? Be ready to be helped of God!"

Philadelphus drew away from her uneasily and looked at her from under

lowered brows.

"They say," he said in a suppressed voice, as fearing his own words,

"that He has come and gone!"

She looked at him blankly. He was glad he had thought of this; it

would divert her from a discourse momently growing unpleasant for him.

And yet he was afraid of the thing he had said.

"What dost thou say?" she asked.

"He is come and gone--they say."

"Come and gone!"

He nodded irritably. It made him nervous to dwell on the subject.

"Who say?" she demanded.

"Many! Many!" he whispered.

"It is not--do you believe it?" she persisted, with strange terror

waiting upon his answer. He moved uneasily but he answered the truth.

It was superstition in him that spoke.

"Something in me says it is true," Philadelphus whispered.

She stood transfixed; then all her horror rose in her and cried out

against the story.

"It can not be!" she cried. "See the misery and oppression, here,

tenfold! Nothing has been done! Nobody heard of Him! He could not

fail! What a blasphemy, what a travesty on His Word, to come and

fulfil it not and go hence unnoticed! It can not be!"

"But, but--" he protested, somehow terrified by her denial, "only you

have not heard. Everywhere are those who believe it and I saw--I

saw--"

The growing violence of dissent on her face urged him to speak what

his shamed and guilty tongue hesitated to pronounce.

"I saw in Ephesus one who saw Him; I saw in Patmos one who had

reclined on His breast!"

"A--a--woman?" she whispered.

"No! No!" he returned in a panic. "A man, a prisoner, old and white

and terrible! But it was in his youth! He told me! And the one in

Ephesus, a red-beard, hunchbacked and half-blind and even more

terrible than the first! He saw Him after He was dead!"

"Dead!" Her lips shaped the word.

"They--yes! He was crucified!"

Her lips parted as if to speak the word, but her mind failed to grasp

it certainly. She stood moveless in an actual pain of horror.