The town was so silent, so empty, so deserted!  No one came out of doors unless under pressure of business or piety.  Every house was a furnace, and even a bath brought no refreshment, for the water had long since ceased to be cold.  A disease had also attacked the ripening dates as they hung; they dropped off in thousands from the heavy clusters under the beautiful bending crown of leaves; and now for two days hundreds of dead fish had been left on the banks.  Even the scaly natives of the river were plague-stricken; and the physician explained to his friend that this brought the inhabitants a fresh danger; for who could clear the shores of the dead fish?—­And, in such heat, how soon they would become putrid!

The old man did not conceal from himself that it was hard, cruelly hard, for the physician to follow his calling conscientiously at such a time; but he knew his friend; he had seen him during months of pestilence two years since—­always brisk, decisive and gay, indeed inspired to greater effort by the greater demands on him.  What had so completely altered him, had poisoned and vexed his soul as with a malignant spell?  It was not the almost superhuman sacrifices required by his duties;—­it came of the unfortunate infatuation of his heart, of which he could not rid himself.

Philippus had kept his promise.  He went every day to the house of Rufinus, and every day he saw Paula; but, as a murdered body bleeds afresh in the presence of the assassin, so every day the old pain revived when he was forced to meet her and speak with her.  The only cure for this particular sufferer was to remove the cause of his pain:  that is to say, to take Paula away out of his path; and this the old man made his care and duty.

Little Mary and the other patients under Rufinus’ roof were on the way to recovery; still there was much to cast gloomy shadows over this happy termination.  Joanna and Pulcheria were very anxious as to the fate of Rufinus.  No news had been received of him or of the sisters, and Philippus was the vessel into which the forsaken wife and Pulcheria—­ who looked up to him as to a kind, faithful, and all-powerful protecting spirit-poured all their sorrows, cares, and fears.  Their forebodings were aggravated by the fact that three times Arab officials had come to the house to enquire about the master and his continued absence.  All that the women told them was written down, and Dame Joanna, whose lips had never yet uttered a lie, had found herself forced to give a false clue by saying that her husband had gone to Alexandria on business, and might perhaps have to proceed to Syria.—­What could these enquiries forebode?  Did they not indicate that Rufinus’ complicity in the rescue of the nuns was known at Fostat?

The authorities there were, in fact, better informed than the women could suspect.  But they kept their knowledge a secret, for it would never do to let the oppressed people know that a handful of Egyptians had succeeded in defeating a party of Arab soldiers; so the Memphites heard no more than a dark rumor of what had occurred.