After Orion had vanished indoors, she still seemed to see him; and when
she thrust his image from her fancy, forced to remind herself that he was
now standing face to face with that other, and was looking at Paula as,
a few days since, he had looked at her, the anguish of her soul was
doubled. And was Paula only half as happy as she had been in that hour
of supreme bliss? Ah! how her heart ached! She longed to leap over the
hedge--she could have rushed into the house and flung herself between
Paula and Orion.

Still, there she sat; restless but without moving; wholly under the
dominion of evil thoughts, among which a good one rarely and timidly
intruded, with her eyes fixed on Rufinus' dwelling. It stood in the
broad sunshine as silent as death, as if all were sleeping. In the
garden, too, all was motionless but the thin jet of water, which danced
up from the marble tank with a soft and fitful, but monotonous tinkle,
while butterflies, dragonflies, bees, and beetles, whose hum she could
not hear, seemed to circle round the flowers without a sound. The birds
must be asleep, for not one was to be seen or broke the oppressive
stillness by a chirp or a twitter. The chariot at the door might have
been spellbound; the driver had dismounted, and he, with the other
slaves, had stretched himself in the narrow strips of shade cast by the
pillars of the verandah; their chins buried in their breasts, they spoke
not a word. The horses alone were stirring-flicking off the flies with
their flowing tails, or turning to bite the burning stings they
inflicted. This now and then lifted the pole, and as the chariot
crunched backwards a few inches, the charioteer growled out a sleepy
"Brrr."

Katharina had laid a large leaf on her head for protection against the