opolis, had gone straight to
Alexandria. He had engagements there for a few days, and would then start
for Medina.

The senator saw nothing for it but to follow him up, and Orion
volunteered to accompany him.

A faint attempt on Heliodora's part to detain him met with a decisive,
nay, stern refusal. This journey was indeed sheer flight from his own
weakness and from the beautiful creature who could never be anything to
him.

Early in the day he had found time to write to Paula; but he had cast
aside more than one unfinished letter before he could find the right
words. He told her that he loved her and her alone; and as his stylus
marked the wax he felt, with horror of himself, that in fact his heart
was Paula's, and his determination ripened to put an end once for all to
his connection with Heliodora, and not allow himself to see Paula again
till he had forever cut the tie that bound him to the young widow.

The two women went out to see the travellers start, and as they returned
to the house, hanging their heads like defeated warriors, in the
vestibule they met Katharina and her maid. Martina wanted to detain the
little girl, and to persuade her to go up to their rooms with them; but
Katharina refused, and appeared to be in a great hurry. She had just come
from seeing Anubis, who was in less pain to-day, and who had done his
best to tell her what he had overheard. That the flight was to be
northwards he was certain; but he had either misunderstood or forgotten
the name of the place whither the sisters were bound.

His mother and the nurse were dismissed from the room, and then the
water-wagtail in her gratitude had bent over him, had raised his pretty
face a little, and had given him two such sweet kisses that the poor boy
had been quite uneasy. But, when he was alone with his mother once more,
he had felt happier and happier, and the remembrance of the transient
rapture he had known had alleviated the pain he was suffering on
Katharina's account.

Katharina, meanwhile, did not go home at once to her mother; on the
contrary, she went straight off to the Bishop of Memphis, to whom she
divulged all she had learnt with regard to the inhabitants of the convent
and the intended rescue. The gentle Plotinus even had been roused to
great wrath, and no sooner had she left him than he set out for Fostat to
invoke the help of Amru, and--finding him absent--of his Vekeel to enable
him to pursue the fugitive Melchite sisters