large house in the garden, on account of the children, to the little
villa opposite the place of worship. It is quiet there, and the air
blows in on her through the open veranda. The Empress herself could not
wish for a better sick-room. And the care Agatha takes of her! You are
right to hasten. The last glimmer of sunshine is extinct, and divine
service will soon begin. I am satisfied with Diodoros too; youth is a
soil on which the physician reaps easy laurels. What will it not heal
and strengthen! Only when the soul is so deeply shaken, as with Melissa
and her brother, matters go more slowly, even with the young. However,
as I said, we are past the crisis."

"God be praised!" said Andreas. "Such news makes me young again.
I could run like a boy." They now entered the well-kept gardens which
lay behind Zeno's house. Noble clumps of tall old trees rose above the
green grass plots and splendid shrubs. Round a dancing fountain were
carefully kept beds of beautiful flowers. The garden ended at a palm-
grove, which cast its shade on Zeno's little private place of worship
--an open plot inclosed by tamarisk hedges like walls. The little villa
in which Melissa lay was in a bower of verdure, and the veranda with the
wide door through which the bed of the sufferer had been carried in,
stood open in the cool evening to the garden, the palm-grove, and the
place of worship with its garland, as it were, of fragile tamarisk
boughs.

Agatha was keeping watch by Melissa; but as the last of the figures,
great and small, who could be seen moving across the garden, all in the
same direction, disappeared behind the tamarisk screen, the young
Christian looked lovingly down at her friend's pale and all too delicate
face, touched her forehead lightly with her lips, and whispered to the
sleeper, as though she could hear her voice: