face towards her and said:

"Then you were at Lochias yesterday. Tell me how you found them all
there. Who guided you to our lodgings and did you see my little brother
and sisters?"

"You are not yet quite free of fever, and I do not know how much I ought
to talk to you--but I would with all my heart."

The words were spoken kindly and there was a deep loving light in the
eyes of the deformed girl as she said them. Selene excited not merely
her sympathy and pity, but her admiration too, for she was so beautiful,
so totally different from herself, and in every little service she
rendered her, she felt like some despised beggar whom a prince might
have permitted to wait upon him. Her hump had never seemed to her so
bent, nor her brown skin so ugly at any other time as it did to-day,
when side by side with this symmetrical and delicate girlish form,
rounded to such tender contours.

But Mary felt not the smallest movement of envy. She only felt happy to
help Selene, to serve her, to be allowed to gaze at her although she was
a heathen. During the night too, she had prayed fervently that the Lord
might graciously draw to himself this lovely, gentle creature, that He
might permit her to recover, and fill her soul with the same love for
the Saviour that gave joy to her own. More than once she had longed to
kiss her, but she dared not, for it seemed to her as though the sick
girl were made of finer stuff than she herself.

Selene felt tired, very tired, and as the pain diminished, a comfortable
sense stole over her of peace and respite in the silent and loving
homeliness of her surroundings; a feeling that was new and very
soothing, though it was interrupted, now and again, by her anxiety for
those at home. Dame Hannah's presence did her good, for she fancied
she recognized in her voice something that had been peculiar to her
mother's, when she had played with her and pressed her with special
affection to her heart.

In the papyrus factory, at the gumming-table, the sight of the little
hunchback had disgusted Selene, but here she observed what good eyes
she had, and how kind a voice, and the care with which Mary lifted the
compress from her foot--as softly, as if in her own hands she felt the
pain that Selene was suffering--and then laid another on the broken
ankle, aroused her gratitude. Her sister Arsinoe was a vain and thorough
Alexandrian girl, and she had nicknamed the poor thing after the ugliest
of the Hellenes