The physician understood her grief; he readily promised not to betray her to any one, and did not blame her, though he again pointed out the danger she had incurred and earnestly insisted that every article of clothing, which she or Heliodora had worn, must be destroyed.  The subtle germ of the malady, he said, clung to everything; every fragment of stuff which had been touched by the plague-stricken was especially fitted to carry the infection and disseminate the disease.  She listened to him in deep alarm, but she could satisfy him on this point; everything she or her companion had worn had been burnt in the bath-room furnace.

The physician went on; and she, heedless of the growing heat, wandered restlessly about the grounds.  Her heart beat with short, quick, painful jerks; an invisible burthen weighed upon her and prevented her breathing freely.  A host of torturing thoughts haunted her unbidden; they were not to be exorcised, and added to her misery:  Neforis dead; the residence in the hands of the Arabs; Orion bereft of his possessions and held guilty of a capital crime.

And the peaceful house beyond the hedge—­what trouble was hanging over its white-haired master and his guileless wife and daughter?  A storm was gathering, she could see it approaching—­and beyond it, like another murky, death-dealing thunder-cloud, was the pestilence, the fearful pestilence.

And it was she, a fragile, feeble girl—­a volatile water-wagtail—­who had brought all these terrors down on them, who had opened the sluice-gates through which ruin was now beginning to pour in on all around her.  She could see the flood surging, swelling—­saw it lapping round her own house, her own feet; drops of sweat bedewed her forehead and hands from terror at the mere thought.  And yet, and yet!—­If she had really had the power to bind calamity in the clouds, to turn the tide back into its channel, she would not have done so!  The uttermost that she longed for, as the fruit of the seed she had sown and which she longed to see ripen, had not yet come to pass—­and to see that she would endure anything, even death and parting from this deceitful, burning, unlovely world.

Death awaited Orion; and before it overtook him he should know who had sharpened the sword.  Perhaps he might escape with his life; but the Arab would not disgorge what he once had seized, and if that young and splendid Croesus should come out of prison alive, but a beggar, then—­ then...  And as for Paula!  As for Heliodora!  For once her little hand had wrenched the thunderbolts from Zeus’ eagle, and she would find one for them!

The sense of her terrible power, to which more than one victim had already fallen, intoxicated her.  She would drive Orion—­Orion who had betrayed her—­into utter ruin and misery; she would see him a beggar at her feet!—­And this it was that gave her courage to do her worst; this, and this alone.  What she would do then, she herself knew not; that lay as yet in the womb of the Future.  She might take a fancy to do something kind, compassionate, and tender.