hanging whence they still heard feeble groans, into a
low, stuffy room, and the over-grown girl slipped in behind them.

Here, on miserable couches, lay an old man shivering, and showing dark
spots on his bare breast and face: and a child of five, whose crimson
cheeks were burning with fever.

Heliodora felt as if she must suffocate in the plague stricken, heavy
atmosphere, and Katharina clung to her helplessly; but the soothsayer
pulled her away, saying: "Each to one bed: you to the child, and
you--the old man."

Involuntarily they obeyed the woman who was panting with fright. The
water-wagtail, who never in her life thought of a sick person, turned
very sick and looked away from the sufferer; but the your widow, who had
spent many and many a night by the death-bed of a man she had loved, and
who, tender-hearted, had often tended her sick slaves with her own hand,
looked compassionately into the pretty, pain-stricken face of the child,
and wiped the dews from his clammy brow.

Katharina shuddered; but her attention was presently attracted to
something fresh; from the other side of the house came a clatter of
weapons, the door was pushed open, and the physician Philippus walked
into the room. He desired the night-watch, who were with him, to wait
outside. He had come by the command of the police authorities, to whose
ears information had been brought that there were persons sick of the
plague in the house of Medea, and that she, nevertheless, continued to
receive visitors. It had long been decided that she must be taken in the
act of sorcery, and warning had that day been given that she expected
illustrious company in the evening. The watch were to find her
red-handed, so to speak; the leech was to prove whether her house was
indeed plague-stricken; and in either case the senate wished to have the
sorceress safe in prison and at their mercy, though even Philippus had
not been taken into their confidence.

The visitors he had come upon were the last he had expected to
find here. He looked at them with a disapproving shake of the head,
interrupted the woman's voluble asseverations that these noble ladies
had come, out of Christian charity, to comfort and help the sick, with
a rough exclamation: "A pack of lies!" and at once led the coerced sick
nurses out of the house. He then represented to them the fearful risk
to which their folly had exposed them, and insisted very positively
on their returning home and, notwith