touched me. Pray have
the fire lighted again, late as it is, and take a bath too."
"But, Child," Susannah began with a laugh; but Katharina gave her no
peace till she yielded, and promised to bathe in the men's room, which
had not been used at all since the appearance of the epidemic. When Dame
Susannah found herself alone she smiled to herself in silent
thankfulness, and in the bath again she lifted up her heart and hands in
prayer for her only child, the loving daughter who cared for her so
tenderly.
Katharina went to her own room, after ascertaining that the clothes she
had worn this evening had been sacrificed in the bath-furnace.
It was past midnight, but still she bid the maid sit up, and she did not
go to bed. She could not have found rest there. She was tempted to go out
on the balcony, and she sat down there on a rocking chair. The night was
sultry and still. Every house, every tree, every wall seemed to radiate
the heat it had absorbed during the day. Along the quay came a long
procession of pilgrims; this was followed by a funeral train and soon
after came another--both so shrouded in clouds of dust that the torches
of the followers looked like coals glimmering under ashes. Several who
had died of the pestilence, and whom it had been impossible to bury by
day, were being borne to the grave together. One of these funerals, so
she vaguely fancied, was Heliodora's; the other her own perhaps--or her
mother's--and she shivered at the thought. The long train wandered on
under its shroud of dust, and stood still when it reached the Necropolis;
then the sledge with the bier came back empty on red hot runners--but she
was not one of the mourners--she was imprisoned in the pestiferous house.
Then, when she was freed again--she saw it all quite clearly--two heads
had been cut off in the courtyard of the Hall of justice: Orion's and
Paula's--and she was left alone, quite alone and forlorn. Her mother was
lying by her father's side under the sand in the cemetery, and who was
there to care for her, to be troubled about her, to protect her? She was
alone in the world like a tree without roots, like a leaf blown out to
sea, like an unfledged bird that has fallen out of the nest.
Then, for the first time since that evening when she had borne false
witness, her memory reverted to all she had been taught at school and in
the church of the torments of hell, and she pictured the abode of the
damned, and the scorching, seet
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