As she spoke she took out the emerald, gave it to the little girl, and charged her to deliver it to her uncle as soon as they should be alone together.  In the little note which she had wrapped around it she implored her lover to regard it as his own property, and to use it to satisfy the claims of the Church.

The man was easily induced to take Mary to her uncle; and how happily she ran on before him up to Orion’s cell, how great was his joy at seeing her again, how gratefully he pressed the emerald to his lips!  But when she exclaimed that her prophecy had been fulfilled, and that Paula, was now his, his brow was knit as he replied, with gloomy regret, that though he had won the woman he loved, it was only to lose her again.

“But the Kadi is your friend and will gain pardon from the Khaliff!” cried the child.

“But then another enemy suddenly starts up:  Horapollo !”

“Oh, our old man!” and the child ground her teeth.  “If you did but know, Orion!—­And to think that I must live under the same roof with him!”

“You!” asked the young man.

“Yes, I. And Pulcheria, and Mother Joanna,” and Mary went on to tell him how the old man had come to live with them and Orion could guess from various indications that she was concealing some important fact; so he pressed her to keep nothing from him, till the child could not at last evade telling him all she had seen and heard.

At this he lost all caution and self-control.  Quite beside himself he called aloud the name of his beloved, invoking in passionate tones the return of the Governor Amru, the only man who could help them in this crisis.  His sole hope was in him.  He had shown himself a real father to him, and had set him a difficult but a noble task.

“Into which you have plunged over head and ears!” cried the child.

“I thought it all out while on my journey,” replied Orion.  “I tried yesterday to write out a first sketch of it, but I lacked what I most wanted:  maps and lists.  Nilus had put them all up together; I was to have taken them with me on the voyage with the nuns, and I ordered that they should be carried to the house of Rufinus. . . .”

“That they should come to us?” interrupted the child with sparkling eyes.  “Oh, they are all there!  I saw the documents myself, when the chest was cleared out for old Horapollo, and to-morrow, quite early to-morrow, you shall have them.”  Orion kissed her brow with glad haste; then, striking the wall of his cell with his fist, he waited till something had been withdrawn with a grating sound on the other side, and exclaimed: 

“Good news, Nilus!  The plans and lists are found:  I shall have them to-morrow!”

“That is well!” replied the treasurer’s thin voice from the adjoining room.  “We shall need something to comfort us!  A prisoner has just been brought in for having attacked an Arab horseman in a riot in the market square.  He tells me some dreadful news.”