At any cost he must and would prevent his nocturnal doings from becoming
known! Some new wrong-doing-nay, the worst was preferable to a stain on
his honor.--Whose could the shoes be? He suddenly held them up on high,
crying with a loud voice: "Do these shoes belong to any of you, you
people? To the gate-keeper perhaps?"

When all were silent, and the porter denied the ownership, he stood
thinking; then he added with a defiant glare, and in a husky voice:
"Then some one who had broken into the house has been startled and
dropped them. Our house-stamp is here on the leather: they were made in
our work-shop, and they still smell of the stable-here, Sebek, you can
convince yourself. Take them into your keeping, man; and tomorrow
morning we will see who has left this suspicious offering in our
vestibule.--You were the first to reach the spot, fair Paula. Did you
see a man about?"

"Yes," she replied with a hostile and challenging stare.

"And which way did he go?"

"He fled across the viridarium like a coward, running across the poor,
well-kept grass-plot to save time, and vanished upstairs in the dwelling-
rooms."

Orion ground his teeth, and a mad hatred surged up in him of this mystery
in woman's form in whose power, as it seemed, his ruin lay, and whose
eyes mashed with revenge and the desire to undo him. What was she
plotting against him? Was there a being on earth who would dare to
accuse him, the spoilt favorite of great and small....? And her look had
meant more than aversion, it had expressed contempt.... How dare she