for, as soon as she learned how seriously the loud disputes of her
fellow-believers were disturbing the sick man's rest, she interfered
so effectually, that the house was as silent as before.

The deaconess Katharine was the name by which she was known, and in a few
minutes she returned to her patient's bedside.

Andreas followed her, with the leech, a man of middle height, whose
shrewd and well-formed head, bald but for a little hair at the sides,
was set on a somewhat ungainly body. His sharp eyes looked hither and
thither, and there was something jerky in his quick movements; still,
their grave decisiveness made up for the lack of grace. He paid no heed
to the bystanders, but threw himself forward rather than bent over the
patient, felt him, and with a light hand renewed his bandages; and then
he looked round the room, examining it as curiously as though he proposed
to take up his abode there, ending by fixing his prominent, round eyes on
Melissa. There was something so ruthlessly inquisitive in that look that
it might, under other circumstances, have angered her. However, as it
was, she submitted to it, for she saw that it was shrewd, and she would
have called the wisest physician on earth to her lover's bedside if she
had had the power.

When Ptolemaeus--for so he was called--had, in reply to the question,
"who is that?" learned who she was, he hastily murmured: "Then she can do
nothing but harm here. A man in a fever wants but one thing, and that is
perfect quiet."

And he beckoned Andreas to the window, and asked him shortly, "Has the
girl any sense?"