It was past midnight, but still she bid the maid sit up, and she did not
go to bed. She could not have found rest there. She was tempted to go
out on the balcony, and she sat down there on a rocking chair. The night
was sultry and still. Every house, every tree, every wall seemed to
radiate the heat it had absorbed during the day. Along the quay came a
long procession of pilgrims; this was followed by a funeral train and
soon after came another--both so shrouded in clouds of dust that the
torches of the followers looked like coals glimmering under ashes.
Several who had died of the pestilence, and whom it had been impossible
to bury by day, were being borne to the grave together. One of these
funerals, so she vaguely fancied, was Heliodora's; the other her own
perhaps--or her mother's--and she shivered at the thought. The long
train wandered on under its shroud of dust, and stood still when it
reached the Necropolis; then the sledge with the bier came back empty on
red hot runners--but she was not one of the mourners--she was imprisoned
in the pestiferous house. Then, when she was freed again--she saw it all
quite clearly--two heads had been cut off in the courtyard of the Hall of
justice: Orion's and Paula's--and she was left alone, quite alone and
forlorn. Her mother was lying by her father's side under the sand in the
cemetery, and who was there to care for her, to be troubled about her, to
protect her? She was alone in the world like a tree without roots, like
a leaf blown out to sea, like an unfledged bird that has fallen out of
the nest.

Then, for the first time since that evening when she had borne false
witness, her memory reverted to all she had been taught at school and in
the church of the torments of hell, and she pictured the abode of the
damned, and the scorching, seething Lake of fire in which murderers,
heretics, false witnesses....