teful, and not in words alone. Go tomorrow to the treasurer's
office; Nilus will give you the only thing by which I can at present
prove my gratitude. Do your best to cherish the child; I have taken care
to provide for your old age."

He rose, cutting short the Greek's profuse expressions of thanks, and
betook himself to his mother. She was still in her room; however, he now
sent word that he had come to see her, and she was ready to admit him,
having expected that he would come even sooner.

She was reclining, half-sitting, on a divan in her cool and shady
bedroom, and she at once told her son of her determination to follow the
physician's advice and entrust the little girl to his friend. She spoke
in a tone of sleepy indifference; but as soon as Orion opposed her and
begged her to keep Mary at home, she grew more lively, and looking him
wrathfully in the face exclaimed: "Can you wish that? How can you ask
me?" and she went on in repining lamentation:

"Everything is changed nowadays. Old age no longer forgets; it is youth
that has a short memory. Your head has long been full of other things,
but I--I still remember who it was that made my lost dear one's last
hours on earth a hell, even in view of the gates of Heaven!" Her breast
heaved with feeble, tearless sobs--a short, convulsive gasping, and
Orion did not dare contravene her wishes. He sought to soothe her
with loving words and, when she recovered herself, he told her that he
proposed to leave her for a short time to look after his estates, as
the law required, and this information gladdened her greatly. To be
alone--solitary and unobserved now seemed delightful. Those white pills
did more for her, raised her spirits better, than any human society.
They brought her dreams, sleeping or waking; dreams a thousand times
more delightful than her real, desolate existence. To give herself up to
memory, to pray, to dream, to picture herself in the other world among
her beloved dead--and besides that to eat and drink, which she was
always ready to do very freely--this was all she asked henceforth of
life on earth.

When, to her further questions, Orion replied that he was going first
to the Delta, she expressed her regret, since, if he had gone to Upper
Egypt, he might have visited his sister-in-law, Mary's mother, in her
convent. She sat up as she spoke, passed her hand across her forehead,
and pointed to a little table near the head of the couch, on which, by
the si