t this last portion was nothing less than
the very foundations of her whole moral and social being.

Her father and her husband's father had been the two leading men in
Memphis, nay, in all Egypt. She had given her hand and a heart full of
love to the son of Menas, a proud and happy woman. It was as one with
her, and not by himself alone, that he had risen to the highest dignity
attainable by a native Egyptian, and she had done everything that lay
in her power to uphold him in a position which many envied him, and in
filling it with dignity and effect. After many years of rare happiness
their grief at the loss of their murdered sons only bound the attached
couple more closely, and when her husband had fallen into bad health she
had gladly shared his seclusion, had devoted herself entirely to caring
for him, and divided all the doubts and anxieties which came upon him
from his political action. The consciousness of being not merely much
but everything to him, was her pride and her joy. Her dislike of Paula
had its rise, in the first instance, in the discovery that she, his
wife, was no longer indispensable to the sufferer when he had his fair
young niece's company. And now?

At night, after long lying awake, when she woke from a snatch of uneasy
sleep, she involuntarily listened for the faint panting breath, but no
heart now throbbed by her side; and when she quitted her lonely couch at
dawn the coming day lay before her as a desert and treeless solitude. By
night, as by day, she constantly tried to call up the image of the dead,
but whenever her small imaginative power had succeeded in doing so--not
unfrequently at first--she had seen him as in the last moments of his
life, a curse on his only son on his trembling lips. This horrible
impression deprived her of the last consolation of the mourner: a
beautiful memory, while it destroyed her proud and glad satisfaction in
her only child. The youth, who had till now been her soul's idol, was
stigmatized and branded in her eyes. She might not ignore the burden
laid on Orion by that most just man; instead of taking him to her heart
with double tenderness and softening or healing the fearful punishment
inflicted by his father, she could only pity him. When Orion came to see
her she would stroke his waving hair and, as she desired not to wound
him and make him even more unhappy than he must be already, she neither
blamed nor admonished him, and never reminded him of his father'