alarm, but she could satisfy him on this point; everything she or her
companion had worn had been burnt in the bath-room furnace.

The physician went on; and she, heedless of the growing heat, wandered
restlessly about the grounds. Her heart beat with short, quick, painful
jerks; an invisible burthen weighed upon her and prevented her breathing
freely. A host of torturing thoughts haunted her unbidden; they were not
to be exorcised, and added to her misery: Neforis dead; the residence in
the hands of the Arabs; Orion bereft of his possessions and held guilty
of a capital crime.

And the peaceful house beyond the hedge--what trouble was hanging over
its white-haired master and his guileless wife and daughter? A storm was
gathering, she could see it approaching--and beyond it, like another
murky, death-dealing thunder-cloud, was the pestilence, the fearful
pestilence.

And it was she, a fragile, feeble girl--a volatile water-wagtail--who had
brought all these terrors down on them, who had opened the sluice-gates
through which ruin was now beginning to pour in on all around her.
She could see the flood surging, swelling--saw it lapping round her own
house, her own feet; drops of sweat bedewed her forehead and hands from
terror at the mere thought. And yet, and yet!--If she had really had the
power to bind calamity in the clouds, to turn the tide back into its
channel, she would not have done so! The uttermost that she longed for,
as the fruit of the seed she had sown and which she longed to see ripen,
had not yet come to pass--and to see that she would endure anything, even
death and parting from this deceitful, burning, unlovely world.

Death awaited Orion; and before it overtook him he should know who had