The physician understood her grief; he readily promised not to betray
her to any one, and did not blame her, though he again pointed out the
danger she had incurred and earnestly insisted that every article of
clothing, which she or Heliodora had worn, must be destroyed. The subtle
germ of the malady, he said, clung to everything; every fragment of
stuff which had been touched by the plague-stricken was especially
fitted to carry the infection and disseminate the disease. She
listened to him in deep alarm, but she could satisfy him on this point;
everything she or her companion had worn had been burnt in the bath-room
furnace.

The physician went on; and she, heedless of the growing heat, wandered
restlessly about the grounds. Her heart beat with short, quick, painful
jerks; an invisible burthen weighed upon her and prevented her breathing
freely. A host of torturing thoughts haunted her unbidden; they were not
to be exorcised, and added to her misery: Neforis dead; the residence in
the hands of the Arabs; Orion bereft of his possessions and held guilty
of a capital crime.

And the peaceful house beyond the hedge--what trouble was hanging over
its white-haired master and his guileless wife and daughter? A storm
was gathering, she could see it approaching--and beyond it, like another
murky, death-dealing thunder-cloud, was the pestilence, the fearful
pestilence.

And it was she, a fragile, feeble girl--a volatile water-wagtail--who
had brought all these terrors down on them, who had opened the
sluice-gates through which ruin was now beginning to pour in on all
around her. She could see the flood surging, swelling--saw it lapping
round her own house, her own feet; drops of sweat bedewed her forehead
and hands from terror at the mere thought. And yet, and yet!--If she had
really had the power to bind calamity in the clouds, to turn the tide
back into its channel, she would not have done so! The uttermost that
she longed for, as the fruit of the seed she had sown and which she
longed to see ripen, had not yet come to pass--and to see that she would
endure anything, even death and parting from this deceitful, burning,
unlovely world.

Death awaited Orion; and before it overtook him he should know who had
sharpened the sword. Perhaps he might escape with his life; but the
Arab would not disgorge what he once had seized, and if that young
and splendid Croesus should come out of prison alive, but a beggar,
then--then..