y. The least word of complaint from either
terrified her; and if Susannah sank on the divan exhausted by the heat,
or Heliodora had a headache after watching through the night by the sick
man, the girl would turn pale, her heart would beat painfully, she would
paint them in fancy stricken by the plague, with burning brows and the
horrible, fatal spots on their foreheads and cheeks; and whenever these
alarms pressed on the young criminal she felt the ominous weight on the
top of her head where the dead bishop's hand had rested.

The senator's wife had so completely changed in her demeanor to the
water-wagtail, since Paula's imprisonment, that to Katharina she was as a
living reproach, so she had no regret at seeing the worthy pair depart.
But scarcely had they left when misfortune took their place as an
unbidden guest.

The slave whose duty it was to heat the baths had reserved a portion of
the infected garments that had been given to him to burn; his son had
helped him, and Katharina's nurse, the mother of her foster-brother
Anubis, had come into direct contact with her immediately after her
return from the soothsayer's and from the bishop's. All three had caught
the disease. They had all three been removed to the hospital tents--the
slave and the nurse as corpses.

But had the fearful infection been taken away with them? If not, it would
be the turn next of those whom she herself had pushed into the arms of
the fell monster: First Heliodora, and then her mother! And she,
rightfully, ought to have fallen before them; and if the pestilence
should seize her and death should drag her down into the grave it would
be showing her mercy. She was still so young, and yet she hated life. It
had nothing in store for her but humiliation and disappointment, arrows
which, sent from the prison, pierced her to the heart, and a torturing
fear which never gave her any peace, day or night.

When the physician came to transport the sick to the hospital in the
desert, he mentioned incidentally that the judges had condemned Paula to
death, and that the populace and senate, in spite of the new bishop's
prohibition, had determined to cast her into the river in accordance with
an ancient custom. Orion's fate was not to be decided till the following
day; but it would hardly be to his advantage in the eyes of his Jacobite
judges, that his betrothed was this Syrian Melchite.

At this Katharina was forced to support herself against her mother's