“With such an assistant everything must go well.  There is no merit in being strong; every one can be strong who comes into the world with healthy blood and well-knit bones, who keeps all his limbs well exercised, as I did in my youth, and who does not destroy his inheritance by dissipated living.—­However, I still feel the struggle in my hands; but there is some good wine in the next room yet, and two or three cups of it will do me good.”  They went together into the adjoining room where, by this time, most of the lamps were extinguished.  Paula poured out the wine, touched the goblet with her lips, and he emptied it at a draught; but he was not to be allowed to drink off a second, for he had scarcely raised it, when they heard voices in the Masdakite’s room, and Neforis came in.  The governor’s careful wife had not quitted her husband’s couch—­even Rustem’s storming had not induced her to leave her post; but when she was informed by the slaves what had been going on, and that Paula was still up-stairs with the leech, she had come to the strangers’ rooms as soon as her husband could spare her to speak to Philippus, to represent to Paula what the proprieties required, and to find out what the strange noises could be which still seemed to fill the house—­at this hour usually as silent as the grave.  They proceeded from the sick-rooms, but also from Orion, who had just come in, and from Nilus the treasurer, who had been called by the former into his room, though the night was fast drawing on to morning.  To the governor’s wife everything seemed ominous at the close of this terrible day, marked in the calendar as unlucky; so she made her way up-stairs, escorted by her husband’s night watcher, and holding in her hand a small reliquary to which she ascribed the power of banning vile spirits.

She came into the sick-room swiftly and noiselessly, put the nun through a strict cross-examination with the fretful sharpness of a person disturbed in her night’s rest.  Then she went into the sitting-room where Philippus was on the point of pledging Paula in his second cup of wine, while she stood before him with dishevelled hair and robe ungirt.  All this was an offence against good manners such as she would not suffer in her house, and she stoutly ordered her husband’s niece to go to bed.  After all the offences that had been pardoned her this day—­no, yesterday—­she exclaimed, it would have been more becoming in the girl to examine herself in silence, in her own room, to exorcise the lying spirits which had her in their power, and implore her Saviour for forgiveness, than to pretend to be nursing the sick while she was carrying on, with a young man, an orgy which, as the Sister had just told her, had lasted since mid-day.

Paula spoke not a word, though the color changed in her face more than once as she listened to this speech.  But when Neforis finally pointed to the door, she said, with all the cold pride she had at her command when she was the object of unworthy suspicions: