on she had
assigned for this insulting step was that Paula had dictated to her pupil
long sentences out of her Orthodox Greek prayerbook. This, it was true,
she had done; but without the smallest concealment; and the passages she
had chosen had contained nothing but what must elevate the soul of every
Christian, of whatever confession.

The child had wept bitterly over her grandmother's fiat, though Paula had
always taken the lessons quite seriously, for Mary loved her older
companion with all the enthusiasm of a half-grown girl--as a child of ten
really is in Egypt; her passionate little heart worshipped the beautiful
maiden who was in every respect so far above her, and Paula's arms had
opened wide to embrace the child who brought sunshine into the gloomy,
chill atmosphere she breathed in her uncle's house. But Neforis regarded
the child's ardent love for her Melchite relation as exaggerated and
morbid, imperilling perhaps her religious faith; and she fancied that
under Paula's influence Mary had transferred her affections from her to
the younger woman with added warmth. Nor was this idea wholly fanciful;
the child's strong sense of justice could not bear to see her friend
misunderstood and slighted, often simply and entirely misjudged and
hardly blamed, so Mary felt it her duty, as far as in her lay, to make up
for her grandmother's delinquencies in regard to the guest who in the
child's eyes was perfection.

But Neforis was not the woman to put up with this demeanor in a child.
Mary was her granddaughter, the only child of her lost son, and no one
should come between them. So she forbid the little girl to go to Paula's
room without an express message, and when a Greek teacher was engaged for
her, her instructions were that she should keep her pupil as much as
possible out of the Syrian damsel's way. All this only fanned the child's
vehement affection; and tenderly as her grandmother would sometimes
caress her--while Mary on her part never failed in dutiful
obedience--neither of them ever felt a true and steady warmth of heart
towards the other; and for this Paula was no doubt to blame, though
against her will and by her mere existence.

Often, indeed, and by a hundred covert hints Dame Neforis gave Paula to
understand that she it was who had alienated her grandchild; there was
nothing for it but to keep the child for whom she yearned, at a distance,
and only rarely reveal to her the abundance of her love. At last