Esther paused, her eyes dilated, and stood a moment with the hands again brought together; and so perfect a figure of truthfulness, and such an impersonation of sincerity, she looked, that the Jewish servant, who understood not a word of the tongue in which she addressed the Greek lady and her son, gazed at her; his work suspended, his cask held high in air, with all the marks of one who heard and accepted some sacred and unquestionable revelation.
"Go on, dear child," said Aglais. "What passed further?"
"I asked the pale image what this meant, that he should term the condition in which he is waiting and has yet to wait a little time--that vast, dim condition--'a house,' 'a city,' and 'a kingdom.' 'The dwellers,' he replied, 'are watched in that kingdom by silent protectors, mighty and beautiful, whose faces, full of a severe, sad love, are the torches and the only light those dwellers ever see; and the vast, dim city has a sunless and a starless sky for its roof, under which they wait; and that sky is the ceiling which echoes the sighs of their pain; and thus to them it has been a kingdom, and a city, and a house; and, until the ninth hour of last Friday, they were numerous as the nations of men!' 'And at the ninth hour of that day, I asked, 'O my father! what occurred when so many departed, and you and a small number were left still to wait?' And he gazed at me for an instant with a wan and wistful look; then, lo! I saw nothing where he had been standing under the fig-tree.
"But it was at the ninth hour of the last Friday the Master had expired by the side of the penitent who was that very day to be with him in paradise!" cried Aglais.
At Esther's arrival, Paulus and Aglais had both risen from a kind of semicircular wicker settle which occupied one of the corners of the roof; and they now, all three, when Esther had finished her strange, brief narrative, leaned silent and musing against the parapet; where, under the shade of a clustering rhododendron, they had a view westward (drawn, as people are who ponder, toward whatever object is most luminous) of the towers and palaces and pinnacles of the Holy City, then reddening in the sunset. One word respecting the spot where the little group was thus collected, and (among modern, and especially western, nations) concerning its peculiar scenic effects.