Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/212

 verity of her advocate the previous night. Conjuring up this memorable interview, which yet remained so colorless that it seemed to have happened only to the soul, the haunting low tones began to speak through the silence of his room; and with an impulse of joy that banished the horror of their insistency he responded to the accents of their truth.

A living voice had entered the room. It was the same voice, and yet so much more resonant than the one he had heard in the prison. The senses of the advocate were strung to a point so perilous that the luminous figure of a woman appeared before them. This was she who had huddled away into the shadows of the jail. The lamp on the table, which with so much difficulty melted the gloom within the area of its influence, framed her contour with a kind of weird delicacy. Her figure was veiled in a soft plasticity; it was that of one who was in despair; yet it had all the simple trust of her sex, which it exhibits at those supreme moments when nothing is left to it save to kneel and to embrace its faith. It was a figure such as this that rolled away the stone from the mouth of the cave and discovered that the body of Jesus was not there.

During the interview the young advocate had known and understood little, but now, under the spell of his passion, an ampler knowledge enfolded him in its mantle. It is not until we look down upon them from the altitude of some momentous phase, that those moments which are destined to assume a permanence in our lives become crystallized into our mental history. The terror and the reti