sleep; but he opened his
eyes more frequently than usual. He missed the light footfall overhead
to which he had been accustomed for these two years past; but she who
was wont to pace the floor above half the night through had not gone
to rest as he supposed. After the events of the evening she had indeed
retired to her room with tingling cheeks and burning eyes; but the
slave-girls, who paid little attention to a guest who was no more than
endured and looked on askance by their mistress, had neglected to open
her window-shutters after sundown, as she had requested, and the room
was oppressively sultry and airless. The wooden shutters felt hot to the
touch, so did the linen sheets over the wool mattrasses. The water in
her jug, and even the handkerchief she took up were warm. To an Egyptian
all this would have been a matter of course; but the native of Damascus
had always passed the summer in her father's country house on the
heights of Lebanon, in cool and lucent shade, and the all-pervading heat
of the past day had been to her intolerable.

Outside it was pleasant now; so without much reflection she pushed open
the shutter, wrapped a long, dark-hued kerchief about her head and
stole down the steep steps and out through a little side door into the
court-yard.

There she drew a deep breath and spread out her arms longingly, as
though she would fain fly far, far from thence; but then she dropped
them again and looked about her. It was not the want of fresh air alone
that had brought her out; no, what she most craved for was to open her
oppressed and rebellious heart to another; and here, in the servants'
quarters, there were two souls, one of which knew, understood and loved
her, while the other was as devoted to her as a faithful dog, and did
errands for her which were to be kept hidden from the governor's house
and its inhabitants.

The first was her nurse who had accompanied her to Egypt; the other was
a freed slave, her father's head groom, who had escorted the women with
his son, a lad, giving them shelter when, after the massacre of Abyla,
they had ventured out of their hiding-place, and after lurking for some
time in the valley of Lebanon, had found no better issue than to fly
to Egypt and put themselves under the protection of the Mukaukas, whose
sister had been Paula's father's first wife. She herself was the child
of his second marriage with a Syrian of high rank, a relation of the
Emperor Heraclius, who had