Nor was his aversion less for the son of the Mukaukas, whom, however, he had never seen; when the leech had confessed to him how deep a grudge against Orion dwelt in the heart of Paula, old Horapollo had chuckled scornfully, and he exclaimed, as though he could read hearts and look into the future—­:  “They snap at each other now, and in a day or two they will kiss again!  Hatred and love are the opposite ends of the same rod; and how easily it is reversed!—­Those two!—­Like in blood is like in kind;—­such people attract each other as the lodestone tends towards the iron and the iron towards the lodestone!”

But these and similar admonitions had produced little effect on the physician’s sentiments; even Paula’s repulse of his ardent appeal after she had moved to the house of Rufinus had failed to extinguish his hope of winning her at last.  This very morning, in the course of the discussion as to the stewardship of her fortune, Paula had been ready and glad to accept him as her Kyrios—­her legal protector and representative; but he now thought that he could perceive by various signs that his venerable friend was right:  that the rod had been reversed, and that aversion had been transformed to love in the girl’s heart.  The anguish of this discovery was hard to bear.  And yet Paula had never shown him such hearty warmth of manner, never had she spoken to him in a voice so soft and so full of feeling, as this evening in the garden.  More cheerful and talkative than usual, she had constantly turned to address him, while he had felt his pain and torment of mind gradually eased, till in him too, sentiment had blossomed anew, and his intellectual power had expanded.  Never—­so he believed—­had he expressed his thoughts better or more brilliantly than in that hour.  Nor had she withheld her approval; she had heartily agreed with his views; and when, half an hour before midnight, he had gone with her to visit his patients, rapturous hopes had sprung once more in his breast.  Ecstatically happy, like a man intoxicated, he had, by her own desire, accompanied her into her sitting-room, and then—­and there....

Poor, disappointed man, sitting on the divan in a dark corner of the spacious room!  In his soul hitherto the intellect had alone made itself heard, the voice of the heart had never been listened to.

How he had found his way home he never knew.  All he remembered was that, in the course of duty, he had gone into the house of a man whose wife—­ the mother of several children—­he had left at noon in a dying state; that he had seen her a corpse, surrounded by loud but sincere mourners; that he had gone on his way, weighed down by their grief and his own, and that he had entered his friend’s rooms rather than his own, to feel safe from himself.  Life had no charm, no value for him now; still, he felt ashamed to think that a woman could thus divert him from the fairest aims of life, that he could allow her to destroy the peace of mind he needed to enable