and such different guests.

All attention was concentrated on a group, which was clearly lighted up
from the doorway.

On the dusty floor of the room cowered an old woman, with dark weather-
beaten features and tangled hair that had long been grey. Her black-blue
cotton shirt was open over her withered bosom, and showed a blue star
tattooed upon it.

In her lap she supported with her hands the head of a girl, whose slender
body lay motionless on a narrow, ragged mat. The little white feet of
the sick girl almost touched the threshold. Near to them squatted a
benevolent-looking old man, who wore only a coarse apron, and sitting all
in a heap, bent forward now and then, rubbing the child's feet with his
lean hands and muttering a few words to himself.

The sufferer wore nothing but a short petticoat of coarse light-blue
stuff. Her face, half resting on the lap of the old woman, was graceful
and regular in form, her eyes were half shut-like those of a child, whose
soul is wrapped in some sweet dream-but from her finely chiselled lips
there escaped from time to time a painful, almost convulsive sob.

An abundance of soft, but disordered reddish fair hair, in which clung a
few withered flowers, fell over the lap of the old woman and on to the
mat where she lay. Her cheeks were white and rosy-red, and when the
young surgeon Nebsecht--who sat by her side, near his blind, stupid
companion, the litany-singer--lifted the ragged cloth that had been
thrown over her bosom, which had been crushed by the chariot wheel, or
when she lifted her slender arm, it was seen that she had the shining