t the bed head, Ra'hel followed the changes in the features of
Tahoser; troubled when she saw them contract and fill with grief,
quieted again when the girl calmed down. Thamar, crouching beside her
mistress, was also watching the priest's daughter, but her face
expressed less kindliness. Coarse instincts showed in the wrinkles of
her brow, pressed down by the broad band of the Hebrew head-dress; her
eyes, still bright in spite of her age, sparkled with curious
questionings in their brown and wrinkled orbits; her bony nose, shining
and curved like a vulture's beak, seemed to scent out secrets; and her
lips, slightly moving, appeared to be framing interrogations.

She was very much concerned about this stranger picked up at the door of
the hut. Whence came she? How did she happen to be there? What was her
purpose? Who could she be? Such were the questions which Thamar asked
herself, and to which, very regretfully, she could find no satisfactory
replies. Besides, Thamar, like all old women, was prejudiced against
beauty, and in this respect Tahoser proved very unpleasant to her. The
faithful servant forgave beauty in her mistress only; for her good looks
she considered as her property, and she was proud and jealous of them.

Seeing that Ra'hel kept silence, the old woman rose and sat down near
her, and winking her eyes, the brown lids of which rose and fell like a
bat's wing, she whispered in the Hebrew tongue, "Mistress, nothing good
will come of this woman."

"Why do you think so, Thamar?" answered Ra'hel, in the same low tone and
using the same language.

"It is strange," went on the suspicious Thamar, "that she should have
fainted there, and not elsewhere."

"She fell at the spot where weakness came upon her."

The old woman shook her head doubtfully.

"Do you suppose," said Poeri's beloved, "that her faint was simulated?
The dissector might have cut her side with his sharp stone, so like a
dead body did she seem. Her dull eyes, her pale lips, her pallid cheeks,
her limp limbs, her skin as cold as that of the dead,--these things
cannot be counterfeited."

"No, doubtless," replied Thamar, "although there are women clever enough
to feign all these symptoms, for some reason or another, so skilfully as
to deceive the most clear-sighted. I believe that the maiden had
swooned, as a matter of fact."

"Then what are you suspicious of?"

"How did she happen to be there in the middle of the night; in this
distant qu