And now these shoes!  The owner must have come there with the crazy girl, and if he had seen him in the tablinum and betrayed what he was doing there, how could he ever again appear in his parents’ presence?  He had looked upon it as a good joke, but now it had turned to bitter earnest.  At any cost he must and would prevent his nocturnal doings from becoming known!  Some new wrong-doing-nay, the worst was preferable to a stain on his honor.—­Whose could the shoes be?  He suddenly held them up on high, crying with a loud voice:  “Do these shoes belong to any of you, you people?  To the gate-keeper perhaps?”

When all were silent, and the porter denied the ownership, he stood thinking; then he added with a defiant glare, and in a husky voice:  “Then some one who had broken into the house has been startled and dropped them.  Our house-stamp is here on the leather:  they were made in our work-shop, and they still smell of the stable-here, Sebek, you can convince yourself.  Take them into your keeping, man; and tomorrow morning we will see who has left this suspicious offering in our vestibule.—­You were the first to reach the spot, fair Paula.  Did you see a man about?”

“Yes,” she replied with a hostile and challenging stare.

“And which way did he go?”

“He fled across the viridarium like a coward, running across the poor, well-kept grass-plot to save time, and vanished upstairs in the dwelling-rooms.”

Orion ground his teeth, and a mad hatred surged up in him of this mystery in woman’s form in whose power, as it seemed, his ruin lay, and whose eyes mashed with revenge and the desire to undo him.  What was she plotting against him?  Was there a being on earth who would dare to accuse him, the spoilt favorite of great and small....?  And her look had meant more than aversion, it had expressed contempt....  How dare she look so at him?  Who in the wide world had a right to accuse him of anything that could justify such a feeling?  Never, never had he met with enmity like this, least of all from a girl.  He longed to annihilate the high-handed, cold-hearted, ungrateful creature who could humble him so outrageously after he had allowed her to see that his heart was hers, and who could make him quail—­a man whose courage had been proved a hundred times.  He had to exercise his utmost self-control not to forget that she was a woman.—­What had happened?  What demon had been playing tricks on him—­What had so completely altered him within this half-hour that his whole being seemed subverted even to himself, and that any one dared to treat him so?

His mother at once observed the terrible change that came over her son’s face when Paula declared that a man had fled towards the dwelling-rooms; but she accounted for it in her own way, and exclaimed in genuine alarm:  “Towards the Nile-wing, the rooms where your father sleeps?  Merciful Heaven! suppose they have planned an attack there!  Run—­fly, Sebek.