isitively and
somewhat at a loss, till at length she rose, and with no little dignity
dismissed him, remarking that now their business was at an end and she
had nothing further to say to him.

This closed the interview; and as the Vekeel quitted the fountain-room
he muttered to himself: "What a woman! Either she is possessed and her
brain is crazed, or she is of a rarely heroic pattern."

Neforis was supported to her own room; when she was in bed she desired
her maid to bring a small box out of her chest and place it on the
little table containing medicines by the bead of the couch.

As soon as she was alone she took out two letters which George had
written to her before their marriage, and a poem which Orion had once
addressed to her; she tried to read them, but the words danced before
her eyes, and she was forced to lay them aside. She took up a little
packet containing hair cut from the heads of her sons after death, and
a lock of her husband's. She gazed on these dear memorials with rapt
tenderness, and now the poppy juice began to take effect: the images of
those departed ones rose clear in her mind, and she was as near to them
as though they were standing in living actuality by her side.

Still holding the curls in her hand, she looked up into vacancy, trying
to apprehend clearly what had occurred within the last few hours and
what lay before her: She must leave this room, this ample couch, this
house--all, in short, that was bound up with the dearest memories of
those she had loved. She was to be forced to this--but did it beseem
her to submit to this Negro, this stranger in the house where she was
mistress? She shook her head with a scornful smile; then opening a glass
phial, which was still half-full of opium pillules, she placed a few on
her tongue and again gazed sky-wards.--Another face now looked down on
her; she saw the husband from whom not even death could divide her, and
at his feet their two murdered sons. Presently Orion seemed to rise
out of the clouds, as a diver comes up from the water, and make for
the shore of the island on which George and the other two seemed to be
standing. His father opened his arms to receive him and clasped him to
his heart, while she herself--or was it only her wraith--went to the
others, who hurried forward to greet her tenderly; and then her husband,
too, met her, and she found rest on his bosom.

For hours, and long before the incursion of the Arabs, she had been
f