self this morning, she was now crushed by a sense of miserable and
impotent weakness. Her defiance had been addressed to a mortal, a frail,
tender woman; and God and Fate had put her in the front of the battle
instead of Heliodora. She shuddered at the thought.

As she went up from the bath-room, her mother met her in the hall and
said:

"What, still here, Child? How you startled me! And is it true? Is
Plotinus really ill of a complaint akin to the plague?"

"Worse than that, mother," she replied sadly. "He has the plague; and
I remembered that a bath is the right thing when one has been in a
plague-stricken house; you, too, have kissed and touched me. Pray have
the fire lighted again, late as it is, and take a bath too."

"But, Child," Susannah began with a laugh; but Katharina gave her no
peace till she yielded, and promised to bathe in the men's room, which
had not been used at all since the appearance of the epidemic. When
Dame Susannah found herself alone she smiled to herself in silent
thankfulness, and in the bath again she lifted up her heart and hands
in prayer for her only child, the loving daughter who cared for her so
tenderly.

Katharina went to her own room, after ascertaining that the clothes she
had worn this evening had been sacrificed in the bath-furnace.

It was past midnight, but still she bid the maid sit up, and she did not
go to bed. She could not have found rest there. She was tempted to go
out on the balcony, and she sat down there on a rocking chair. The night
was sultry and still. Every house, every tree, every wall seemed to
radiate the heat it had absorbed during the day. Along the quay came a
long procession of pilgrims; this was followed by a funeral train and
soon after came another--both so shrouded in clouds of dust that the
torches of the followers looked like coals glimmering under ashes.
Several who had died of the pestilence, and whom it had been impossible
to bury by day, were being borne to the grave together. One of these
funerals, so she vaguely fancied, was Heliodora's; the other her own
perhaps--or her mother's--and she shivered at the thought. The long
train wandered on under its shroud of dust, and stood still when it
reached the Necropolis; then the sledge with the bier came back empty on
red hot runners--but she was not one of the mourners--she was imprisoned
in the pestiferous house. Then, when she was freed again--she saw it all
quite clearly--two heads had been cu