to call on her, though she was always very coldly received.

At first Katharina had pitied the young woman whose superior in
intelligence she knew herself to be; but a certain incident had
extinguished this feeling; she now simply hated her, and pricked her with
needle-thrusts whenever she had a chance. Paula seemed invulnerable;
but there was not a pang which Katharina would not gladly have given her
to whom she owed the deepest humiliation her young life had ever known.
How was it that Paula failed to regard Heliodora as a rival? She had
reflected that, if Orion had really returned the widow's passion, he
could not have borne so long a separation. It was on purpose to avoid
Heliodora, and to remain faithful to what he was and must always be to
Paula, that he had gone with the senator, far from Memphis. Heliodora--
her instinct assured her--was the poor, forsaken woman with whom he had
trifled at Byzantium, and for whom he had committed that fatal theft of
the emerald. If Fate would but bring him home to her, and if she then
yielded all he asked--all her own soul urged her to grant, then she would
be the sole mistress and queen of his heart--she must be, she was sure of
it! And though, even as she thought of it, she bowed her head in care,
it was not from fear of losing him; it was only her anxiety about her
father, her good old friend, Rufinus, and his family, whom she had made
so entirely her own.

This was the state of affairs this morning, when to his old friend's
vexation, Philippus had so hastily and silently drunk off his after-
breakfast draught; just as he set down the cup, the black door-keeper
announced that a hump-backed man wished to see his master at once on
important business.

"Important business!" repeated the leech. "Give me four more legs in