Then she brought the conversation round to Katharina, and the widow told her that her brother-in-law, Chrysippus, was now in Memphis with his two little daughters.  They were to go away on the morrow, so the young girl had been obliged to devote herself to them:  “And so the poor child is sitting there at this minute,” she lamented, “and must keep those two little chatter-boxes quiet while she is longing to be here instead.”

Orion quite understood these last words; he asked after the young girl, and then added gaily: 

“She promised me a collar yesterday for my little white keepsake from Constantinople.  Fie!  Mary, you should not tease the poor little beast.”

“No, let the dog go,” added the widow, addressing the governor’s little granddaughter, who was trying to make the recalcitrant dog kiss her doll.  “But you know, Orion, this tiny creature is really too delicate for such a big man as you are!  You should give him to some pretty young lady and then he would fulfil his destiny!  And Katharina is embroidering him a collar; I ought not to tell her little secret, but it is to have gold stars on a blue ground.”

“Because Orion is a star,” cried the little girl.  “So she is working nothing but Orions.”

“But fortunately there is but one star of my name,” observed he.  “Pray tell her that Dame Susa.”

The child clapped her hands.  “He does not choose to have any other star near him!” she exclaimed.

The widow broke in:  “Little simpleton!  I know people who cannot even bear to have a likeness traced between themselves and any one else.—­But this you must permit, Orion—­you were quite right just now, Neforis; his mouth and brow might have been taken from his father’s face.”

The remark was quite accurate; and yet it would have been hard to imagine two men more unlike than the bright youth full of vitality, and the languid old man on the couch, to whom even the small exertion of moving the men was an effort.  The Mukaukas might once have been like his son, but in some long past time.  Thin grey locks now only covered one half of his bald head, and of his eyes, which, thirty years since, had sparkled perhaps as keenly as Orion’s, there was usually nothing, or very little to be seen; for the heavy lids always drooped over them as though they had lost the power to open, and this gave his handsome but deathly-pale face a somewhat owl-like look.  It was not morose, however; on the contrary the mingled lines of suffering and of benevolent kindliness resulted in an expression only of melancholy.  The mouth and flabby cheeks were as motionless as though they were dead.  Grief, anxiety and alarms seemed to have passed over them with a paralysing hand and had left their trace there.  He looked like a man weary unto death, and still living only because fate had denied him the grace to die.  Indeed, he had often been taken for dead by his family when he had dipped too freely into a certain little blood-stone box to take too many of the white opium-pills, one of which he placed between his colorless lips at long intervals, even during his game of draughts.