where, by this time, most of the lamps were extinguished. Paula poured
out the wine, touched the goblet with her lips, and he emptied it at a
draught; but he was not to be allowed to drink off a second, for he had
scarcely raised it, when they heard voices in the Masdakite's room, and
Neforis came in. The governor's careful wife had not quitted her
husband's couch--even Rustem's storming had not induced her to leave
her post; but when she was informed by the slaves what had been going on,
and that Paula was still up-stairs with the leech, she had come to the
strangers' rooms as soon as her husband could spare her to speak to
Philippus, to represent to Paula what the proprieties required, and to
find out what the strange noises could be which still seemed to fill the
house--at this hour usually as silent as the grave. They proceeded from
the sick-rooms, but also from Orion, who had just come in, and from Nilus
the treasurer, who had been called by the former into his room, though
the night was fast drawing on to morning. To the governor's wife
everything seemed ominous at the close of this terrible day, marked in
the calendar as unlucky; so she made her way up-stairs, escorted by her
husband's night watcher, and holding in her hand a small reliquary to
which she ascribed the power of banning vile spirits.

She came into the sick-room swiftly and noiselessly, put the nun through
a strict cross-examination with the fretful sharpness of a person
disturbed in her night's rest. Then she went into the sitting-room where
Philippus was on the point of pledging Paula in his second cup of wine,
while she stood before him with dishevelled hair and robe ungirt. All
this was an offence against good manners such as she would not suffer in
her house, and she stoutly ordered her husband's niece to go to bed.
After all the offences that had been pardoned her this day--no,
yesterday--she exclaimed, it would have been more becoming in the girl
to examine herself in silence, in her own room, to exorcise the lying