face to face of a night with a purely genealogical chapter, Phyllis of Philistia had difficulty in crushing down her unworthy desire to turn to some chapter that seemed to her frail judgment to contain words of wider comfort to the children of men than a genealogical tree of the Children of Israel; but she had never yielded to so unworthy an impulse.  Who was she that she should suggest that one part of the Sacred Book was calculated to be more profitable than another?  Was it not all the Bible?

She had plowed her way through the slough of Hebrew names upon these occasions, and the blessing of the words had been borne to her in the form of a sweet sleep.

Her chapter for this night was that which describes the campaign of David, during which he and his hosts were besieged in their earthworks, and how the three mighty men had made a sortie through the camp of the enemy in order to obtain for their leader a cup of water.

She continued the chapter to the end, but all through it those words were ringing in her ears: 

“It is the price of blood; it is the price of blood.”

And as she knelt down beside her bed, her bare white feet peeping out from beneath the drapery of her white night-dress, in a posture that would have made the most human atheist believe in the beauty of devotion, those words were still in her ears:  “The price of blood; the price of blood.”

Good Heavens!  How could she carry that feather fan?  How could Ella Linton hold it up to her face—­hold her face down to it, flutter its fairy fluff upon her cheeks?  It was the price of blood.  Herbert Courtland had run a greater risk to obtain those feathers than David’s mighty men had run to draw the water from the well.  She had heard all about the insatiable savagery of the natives of New Guinea.  Paradise?  Who had named those birds the birds of paradise?  She recollected how the feathers which Ella had whirled about had held in the very center of every wonderful disc of rich purple, edged with unequal radiating lines of gold, a single spot of brilliant crimson, with a tiny star of silver in the center.  The effect of the sunlight glinting over this combination on the thousand feathers that swept after the bird had caused Herbert Courtland, the first white man who had seen this glory of glories, to call it the meteor-bird.  But those crimson drops:  were they not the blood of the men who had perished miserably while endeavoring to wrest its marvels from the tropical forests of that great island?

Paradise?

And Ella could treat those feathers as though they had been plucked from a tame pheasant?  And now she was lying in her bed with the fan on the pillow beside her!

How could she do it?  That was what the girl asked herself while she lay awake on her own bed.  Would Ella not see, on the white pillow beside her head, the crimson stains of the feathers that had been snatched out of the dripping red hand of death, but the man who had not feared to grapple with death itself in that hell which people called a paradise?