“But what is the meaning of all this?  You, who know me, who have seen me ruling and caring for my family, you turn your back upon me in my own house and point the finger at me?  Have I not always been a faithful wife, nursing my husband for years and never leaving his sick-bed, never thinking of anything but how to ease his pain?  I have lived like a recluse from sheer sense of duty and faithful lose, while other wives, who have less means than I, live in state and go to entertainments.—­And whose slaves are better kept and more often freed than ours?  Where is the beggar so sure of an alms as in our house, where I, and I alone, uphold piety?—­And now am I so fallen that the sun may not shine on me, and that a worthy man like you should withdraw his friendship all in a moment, and for the sake of this ungrateful, loveless creature—­because, because, what did you call it—­because the mind is wanting in me—­or what did you call it that I must have before you....?”

“It is called feeling,” interrupted the leech, who was sorry for the unhappy woman, in whom he knew there was much that was good.  “Is the word quite new to you, my lady Neforis?—­It is born with us; but a firm will can elevate the least noble feeling, and the best that nature can bestow will deteriorate through self-indulgence.  But, in the day of judgment, if I am not very much mistaken, it is not our acts but our feeling that will be weighed.  It would ill-become me to blame you, but I may be allowed to pity you, for I see the disease in your soul which, like gangrene in the body. . .”

“What next!” cried Neforis.

“This disease,” the physician calmly went on—­“I mean hatred, should be far indeed from so pious a Christian.  It has stolen into your heart like a thief in the night, has eaten you up, has made bad blood, and led you to treat this heavily-afflicted orphan as though you were to put stocks and stones in the path of a blind man to make him fall.  If, as it would seem, my opinion still weighs with you a little, before Paula leaves your house you will ask her pardon for the hatred with which you have persecuted her for years, which has now led you to add an intolerable insult—­in which you yourself do not believe—­to all the rest.”

At this Paula, who had been watching the physician all through his speech, turned to Dame Neforis, and unclasped her hands which were lying in her lap, ready to shake hands with her uncle’s wife if she only offered hers, though she was still fully resolved to leave the house.

A terrible storm was raging in the lady’s soul.  She felt that she had often been unkind to Paula.  That a painful doubt still obscured the question as to who had stolen the emerald she had unwillingly confessed before she had come up here.  She knew that she would be doing her husband a great service by inducing the girl to remain, and she would only too gladly have kept the leech in the house;—­but then how deeply had she, and her son, been humiliated by this haughty creature!