But a change had first come over her after Orion’s kiss in the intoxicating perfume of the flowering trees; and almost every hour since had roused her to new hopes and new views.  It had never before occurred to her to criticise or judge her mother; now she was constantly doing so.  The way in which Susannah had cut herself off from her neighbors in the governor’s house, to her daughter seemed perverse and in bad taste; and the bitterly vindictive attacks on her old friends, which were constantly on Susannah’s lips, aggrieved the girl, and finally set her in opposition to her mother, whose judgment had hitherto seemed to her infallible.  Thus, when the governor’s house was closed against her, there was no one in whom she cared to confide, for a barrier stood between her and Paula, and she was painfully conscious of its height each time the wish to pass it recurred to her mind.  Paula was certainly “that other” of whom Orion had spoken; when she had stolen away to see her in the evening after the funeral, she had been prompted less by a burning wish to pour out her heart to a sympathizing hearer, than by torturing curiosity mingled with jealousy.  She had crept through the hedge with a strangely-mixed feeling of tender longing and sullen hatred; when they had met in the garden she had at first given herself up to the full delight of being free to speak, and of finding a listener in a woman so much her superior; but Paula’s reserved replies to her bold questioning had revived her feelings of envy and grudge.  Any one who did not hate Orion must, she was convinced, love him.

Were they not perhaps already pledged to each other!  Very likely Paula had thought of her as merely a credulous child, and so had concealed the fact!

This “very likely” was torture to her, and she was determined to try, at any rate, to settle the doubt.  She had an ally at her command; this was her foster-brother, the son of her deaf old nurse; she knew that he would blindly obey all her wishes—­nay, to please her, would throw himself to the crocodiles in the Nile.  Anubis had been her comrade in all her childish sports, till at the age of fourteen, after learning to read and write, her mother had obtained an appointment for him in the governor’s household, as an assistant to be further trained by the treasurer Nilus.  Dame Susannah intended to find him employment at a future date on her estates, or at Memphis, the centre of their administration, as he might prove himself capable.  The lad was still living with his mother under the rich widow’s roof, and only spent his working days at the governor’s house, he was industrious and clever during office hours, though between whiles he busied himself with things altogether foreign to his future calling.  At Katharina’s request he had opened a communication between the two houses by means of carrier-pigeons, and many missives were thus despatched with little gossip, invitations, excuses, and the like, from Katharina to Mary and back again.  Anubis took great pleasure in the pretty creatures, and by the permission of his superiors a dovecote was erected on the roof of the treasurer’s house.  Mary was now lying ill, and their intercourse was at an end; still, the well-trained messengers need not be idle, and Katharina had begun to use them for a very different purpose.