owadays. Old age no longer forgets; it is youth
that has a short memory. Your head has long been full of other things,
but I--I still remember who it was that made my lost dear one's last
hours on earth a hell, even in view of the gates of Heaven!" Her breast
heaved with feeble, tearless sobs--a short, convulsive gasping, and Orion
did not dare contravene her wishes. He sought to soothe her with loving
words and, when she recovered herself, he told her that he proposed to
leave her for a short time to look after his estates, as the law
required, and this information gladdened her greatly. To be
alone--solitary and unobserved now seemed delightful. Those white pills
did more for her, raised her spirits better, than any human society. They
brought her dreams, sleeping or waking; dreams a thousand times more
delightful than her real, desolate existence. To give herself up to
memory, to pray, to dream, to picture herself in the other world among
her beloved dead--and besides that to eat and drink, which she was always
ready to do very freely--this was all she asked henceforth of life on
earth.

When, to her further questions, Orion replied that he was going first to
the Delta, she expressed her regret, since, if he had gone to Upper
Egypt, he might have visited his sister-in-law, Mary's mother, in her
convent. She sat up as she spoke, passed her hand across her forehead,
and pointed to a little table near the head of the couch, on which, by
the side of a cup with fruit syrup, phials, boxes, and other objects, lay
a writing-tablet and a letter-scroll. This she took up and handed to
Orion, saying:

"A letter from your sister-in-law. It came last evening and I began to
read it; but the first words are a complaint of your father, and
that--you know, just before going to sleep--I could not read any more; I
could not bear it! And to-day; first there was church, and then the
physician came with his request about the child; I have not yet found
courage to read the rest of it.--What can any letter bring to me but
evil! Do you know at all whence anything pleasant could come to me? But
now: read me the letter. Not that part again about your father; that I
will keep till presently for myself alone."

Orion undid the roll, and with quivering lips glanced over the nun's
accusations against his father. The wildest fanaticism breathed in every
line of this epistle from the martyr's widow. She had found in the
cloister all she sought: sh