Free Two from Galilee by Marjorie Holmes

see the moon. It had risen late and was running, running, face half-averted, yet smiling at some secret within its own white burning heart. And the clouds pursued it, their effulgent veils trailing seductively across the mystery of its shining, or falling away like garments cast aside. And winking in and about and all around the lovely race were the stars.
    Steady, singing night sounds came up to her; dew had stirred up the fragrance of the earth, the trees, the almond blossoms. She was dazed and shaken. It seemed to her incredible that there should be sorrow and dissension on such a night. It was too beautiful. God's world was simply too beautiful to countenance ugliness and agony, whether it be on the epic scale of Israel's prostration, or the sheer stabbing torments of the human heart.
    And it seemed strangest of all that love could be the cause. Hatred, yes—it was hatred that accounted for the cruelties of Rome. But love! . . . Her parents loved her, both of them, just as she loved them. And she loved Joseph and he loved her. And yet in the strange contortions of human affairs, somehow this mixture of love had given birth to the anguish that now assailed them all.
    Without realizing it, she still clutched the small towel that Joseph had dropped. Now she used it to wipe her wet eyes, and pressed it an instant against her mouth. Then she lifted it up in a little gesture of sacrifice. "Jahveh forgive me," she whispered again. "If it be thy will that I think no more of Joseph, let me know, and let me be resigned."
    There was no answer. The stars continued to dance and blaze in a fashion at once friendly and remote. There was naught but the dry rattle of the vines in the breeze, the soughing and gentle threshing of the palms and the olive trees beyond. Sometimes, when she was very young, she had felt such an intensity of communion with the unknown, inconceivable presence, that it had seemed to her that she had actually heard it speak. "Mary . . . Mary! . . ." Even at times as if a majestic yet infinitely tender hand had touched her hair, her cheek. Enthralled, eager, innocent, she had rushed to confide these experiences to Hannah, who only looked dismayed.
    "Don't be deceived," her mother had warned. "You have an unusually vivid imagination. See that you learn to discern between that which is only pretense or a dream."
    Yes, to distinguish the true from the false. To know the actuality from the dream. Yet when the first breath one drew in the morning belonged to God, when no morsel was eaten without first asking his blessing, when it was he who ruled not only the universe but the smallest fragment of your life—how was it possible that he did not draw literally close to you at times? Flow in and through and around you, making you even more fully one with him? And that he did not move you so deeply in so doing that you felt his almighty hand upon you, heard the impossible voice speak?
    She could not express it. There were no words in which to make this mystery plain. But dumbly, blindly, beautifully, the unreasonable conviction remained. Jahveh did love and communicate with his children. Perhaps only the very young children who were sufficiently pure and simple to be receptive to his touch. Those who were not yet corrupted by the emotions that beset us as we grow older—jealousy and worry and selfishness. And the desires that lashed her even now as she stood by the sill, striving for peace.
    Joseph. Joseph. . . . But beyond the whitewashed walls her mother wept, and overhead her father paced. . . . She longed to be as a little child again, untouched by the pains of her womanhood. She longed with a sharp nostalgia for the blessed peace of the presence of God. "Thy will be done," she whispered one final time. "In this matter of Joseph, let me only obey."
    All was stillness now. She could no longer hear her father's footfalls or her mother's sobs. A lizard scurried up the walls. Somewhere in the cupboard a mouse gnawed. Yet the