Page:The centurion's story (IA centurionsstory00macf).pdf/44

 and so serious. I dropped my hand upon a rose. I snapped it off and held it before him. While he looked, I dismantled it, petal by petal, the while he watched. "Look," I said, when nothing remained. "A moment before, a beautiful rose, its fragrance floating on the breeze, now its petals are borne upon the air to wither and be lost. It is gone. It will never be again. There will be other roses, but never that rose. So, your prophet is gone. There will be other prophets, but never that prophet again. Only in that great beyond of which we have spoken, our shades living on, there, it may be in a voiceless existence, his spirit may mingle with our own and we three, by such means as spirits use, may commune upon the nature of human existence."

The young man watched the breeze take up the rose petals one by one and bear them away, and then with a heavy sigh and a grave manner, as of one whose thoughts were far too deep for words, he turned and groped his way into the path that led down the mountainside to Jerusalem.

How long I stood lost in reverie I cannot tell, but by something I was recalled to myself and my surroundings. My first thought was that the wind had freshened. The whole mountainside seemed a-quiver. There was a rustle in every branch and bush and flower and petal and blade of grass. The very cells and tissues of my body had caught the thrill of something wonderful; of some rare potentiality that was cosmic in its measure. My mind was filled with a strange uplift and feeling as of a new world about to be born out of the past and all the future swung around me in a mighty circle.

In the east from where I stood, upon the brow of the