for he had scarcely
raised it, when they heard voices in the Masdakite's room, and Neforis
came in. The governor's careful wife had not quitted her husband's
couch--even Rustem's storming had not induced her to leave her post; but
when she was informed by the slaves what had been going on, and that
Paula was still up-stairs with the leech, she had come to the strangers'
rooms as soon as her husband could spare her to speak to Philippus, to
represent to Paula what the proprieties required, and to find out what
the strange noises could be which still seemed to fill the house--at this
hour usually as silent as the grave. They proceeded from the sick-rooms,
but also from Orion, who had just come in, and from Nilus the treasurer,
who had been called by the former into his room, though the night was
fast drawing on to morning. To the governor's wife everything seemed
ominous at the close of this terrible day, marked in the calendar as
unlucky; so she made her way up-stairs, escorted by her husband's night
watcher, and holding in her hand a small reliquary to which she ascribed
the power of banning vile spirits.

She came into the sick-room swiftly and noiselessly, put the nun through
a strict cross-examination with the fretful sharpness of a person
disturbed in her night's rest. Then she went into the sitting-room where
Philippus was on the point of pledging Paula in his second cup of wine,
while she stood before him with dishevelled hair and robe ungirt. All
this was an offence against good manners such as she would not suffer in
her house, and she stoutly ordered her husband's niece to go to bed.
After all the offences that had been pardoned her this day--no,
yesterday--she exclaimed, it would have been more becoming in the girl to
examine herself in silence, in her own room, to exorcise the lying
spirits which had her in their power, and implore her Saviour for
forgiveness, than to pretend to be nursing the sick while she was
carrying on, with a young man, an orgy which, as the Sister had just told
her, had lasted since mid-day.

Paula spoke not a word, though the color changed in her face more than
once as she listened to this speech. But when Neforis finally pointed to
the door, she said, with all the cold pride she had at her command when
she was the object of unworthy suspicions:

"Your aim is easily seen through. I should scorn to reply, but that you
are the wife of the man who, till you set him against me, was glad