Still holding the curls in her hand, she looked up into vacancy, trying to apprehend clearly what had occurred within the last few hours and what lay before her:  She must leave this room, this ample couch, this house—­all, in short, that was bound up with the dearest memories of those she had loved.  She was to be forced to this—­but did it beseem her to submit to this Negro, this stranger in the house where she was mistress?  She shook her head with a scornful smile; then opening a glass phial, which was still half-full of opium pillules, she placed a few on her tongue and again gazed sky-wards.—­Another face now looked down on her; she saw the husband from whom not even death could divide her, and at his feet their two murdered sons.  Presently Orion seemed to rise out of the clouds, as a diver comes up from the water, and make for the shore of the island on which George and the other two seemed to be standing.  His father opened his arms to receive him and clasped him to his heart, while she herself—­or was it only her wraith—­went to the others, who hurried forward to greet her tenderly; and then her husband, too, met her, and she found rest on his bosom.

For hours, and long before the incursion of the Arabs, she had been feeling half stunned and her mind clouded; but now a delicious, slumberous lethargy came over her, to which her whole being urged her to yield.  But every time her eyes closed, the thought of the morrow shot through her brain, and finally, with a great effort, she sat up, took some water—­which was always close at hand—­shook into it the remaining pillules in the bottle, and drank it off to the very last drop.

Her hand was steady; the happy smile on her lips, and the eager expression of her eyes, might have led a spectator to believe that she was thirsty and had mixed herself a refreshing draught.  She had no look of a desperate creature laying violent hands on her own life; she felt no hesitancy, no fear of death, no burthen of the guilt she was incurring—­nothing but ecstatic weariness and hope; blissful hope of a life without end, united to those she loved.

Hardly had she swallowed the deadly draught when she shivered with a sudden chill.  Raising herself a little she called her maid, who was sitting up in the adjoining room; and as the woman looked alarmed at her mistress’s fixed stare, she stammered out:  “A priest—­quick—­I am dying.”

The woman flew off to the viridarium to call Sebek, who was standing in front of the tablinum with the Vekeel; she told him what had happened, and the Negro gave him leave to obey his dying mistress, escorting him as far as the gate.  Just outside, the steward met a deacon who had been giving the blessing of the Church to a poor creature dying of the pestilence, and in a few minutes they were standing by the widow’s bed.

The locks of her sons’ hair lay by her side; her hands were folded over a crucifix; but her eyes, which had been fixed on the features of the Saviour, had wandered from it and again gazed up to Heaven.