"Thou art too white," she said. "I will have no such whiteness. It is
the whiteness of--of an accursed thing. Get thee gone!"

He went away, feeling cold and shaken. He knew he was white. One or two
almsgivers had spoken of it, and had looked at him a little fearfully.
He himself could see that the flesh of his thin body was becoming an
unearthly color. Now and then he had shuddered as he looked at it
because--because--There was one curse so horrible beyond all others that
the strongest man would have quailed in his dread of its drawing near
him. And he was a child, a twelve-year-old boy, a helpless little
hunchback mendicant.

When he saw the first white-and-red spot upon his flesh he stood still
and stared at it, gasping, and the sweat started out upon him and rolled
down in great drops.

"Jehovah!" he whispered, "God of Israel! Thy servant is but a child!"

But there broke out upon him other spots, and every time he found a new
one his flesh quaked, and he could not help looking at it in secret
again and again. Every time he looked it was because he hoped it might
have faded away. But no spot faded away, and the skin on the palms of
his hands began to be rough and cracked and to show spots also.


In a cave on a hillside near the road where he sat and begged there
lived a deathly being who, with face swathed in linen and with bandaged
stumps of limbs, hobbled forth now and then, and came down to beg also,
but always keeping at a distance from all human creatures, and, as he