but she could not yet perceive that this last portion was nothing less
than the very foundations of her whole moral and social being.

Her father and her husband's father had been the two leading men in
Memphis, nay, in all Egypt. She had given her hand and a heart full of
love to the son of Menas, a proud and happy woman. It was as one with
her, and not by himself alone, that he had risen to the highest dignity
attainable by a native Egyptian, and she had done everything that lay in
her power to uphold him in a position which many envied him, and in
filling it with dignity and effect. After many years of rare happiness
their grief at the loss of their murdered sons only bound the attached
couple more closely, and when her husband had fallen into bad health she
had gladly shared his seclusion, had devoted herself entirely to caring
for him, and divided all the doubts and anxieties which came upon him
from his political action. The consciousness of being not merely much
but everything to him, was her pride and her joy. Her dislike of Paula
had its rise, in the first instance, in the discovery that she, his wife,
was no longer indispensable to the sufferer when he had his fair young
niece's company. And now?

At night, after long lying awake, when she woke from a snatch of uneasy
sleep, she involuntarily listened for the faint panting breath, but no
heart now throbbed by her side; and when she quitted her lonely couch at
dawn the coming day lay before her as a desert and treeless solitude.
By night, as by day, she constantly tried to call up the image of the
dead, but whenever her small imaginative power had succeeded in doing so
--not unfrequently at first--she had seen him as in the last moments of
his life, a curse on his only son on his trembling lips. This horrible
impression deprived her of the last consolation of the mourner:
a beautiful memory, while it destroyed her proud and glad satisfaction