d the young widow with feeling.

"Our best and truest friend," sobbed Susannah. "It is, it really is too
much. I often think that I must myself succumb, and as for her--hardly
more than a child!--And with what resignation she bears the heaviest
sorrows!--You, Heliodora, are far from knowing what she has gone through;
but you have no doubt seen how her only thought is to seem bright, so as
to cheer my heart. Not a sigh, not a complaint has passed her lips. She
submits like a saint to everything, without a murmur. But, now that her
clear old friend is stricken, she has lost her self-control for the first
time. She knows all that Plotinus has been to me." And she broke down
into fresh sobbing. When she was a little calmer, she apologised for her
weakness and bid her fair guest good night.

Katharina, meanwhile, was taking a bath.

A bathroom was an indispensable adjunct to every wealthy Graeco-Egyptian
house, and her father had taken particular pains with its construction.
It consisted of two chambers, one for men and one for women; both fitted
with equal splendor.

White marble, yellow alabaster, purple porphyry on all sides; while the
pavement was of fine Byzantine mosaic on a gold ground. There were no
statues, as in the baths of the heathen; the walls were decorated with
bible texts in gold letters, and above the divan, which was covered with
a giraffe skin, there was a crucifix. On the middle panel of the coffered
ceiling was inscribed defiantly, in the Coptic language the first axiom
of the Jacobite creed: "We believe in the single, indivisible nature of
Christ Jesus." And below this hung silver lamps.

The large bath had been filled immediately for Katharina, as the furnace
was heated every evening for the ladies of the house. As she was
undressing, her maid showed her a diseased date. The head gardener, had
brought it to her, for he had that afternoon, discovered that his palms,
too, had been attacked. But the woman soon regretted her loquacity, for
when she went on to say that Anchhor, the worthy shoemaker who, only the
day before yesterday, had brought home her pretty new sandals, had died
of the plague, Katharina scolded her sharply and bid her be silent. But
as the maid knelt before her to unfasten her sandals, Katharina herself
took up the story again, asking her whether the shoemaker's pretty young
wife had also been attacked. The girl said that she was still alive, but
that the old mother-in-law and all