“But, Child,” Susannah began with a laugh; but Katharina gave her no peace till she yielded, and promised to bathe in the men’s room, which had not been used at all since the appearance of the epidemic.  When Dame Susannah found herself alone she smiled to herself in silent thankfulness, and in the bath again she lifted up her heart and hands in prayer for her only child, the loving daughter who cared for her so tenderly.

Katharina went to her own room, after ascertaining that the clothes she had worn this evening had been sacrificed in the bath-furnace.

It was past midnight, but still she bid the maid sit up, and she did not go to bed.  She could not have found rest there.  She was tempted to go out on the balcony, and she sat down there on a rocking chair.  The night was sultry and still.  Every house, every tree, every wall seemed to radiate the heat it had absorbed during the day.  Along the quay came a long procession of pilgrims; this was followed by a funeral train and soon after came another—­both so shrouded in clouds of dust that the torches of the followers looked like coals glimmering under ashes.  Several who had died of the pestilence, and whom it had been impossible to bury by day, were being borne to the grave together.  One of these funerals, so she vaguely fancied, was Heliodora’s; the other her own perhaps—­or her mother’s—­and she shivered at the thought.  The long train wandered on under its shroud of dust, and stood still when it reached the Necropolis; then the sledge with the bier came back empty on red hot runners—­but she was not one of the mourners—­she was imprisoned in the pestiferous house.  Then, when she was freed again—­she saw it all quite clearly—­two heads had been cut off in the courtyard of the Hall of justice:  Orion’s and Paula’s—­and she was left alone, quite alone and forlorn.  Her mother was lying by her father’s side under the sand in the cemetery, and who was there to care for her, to be troubled about her, to protect her?  She was alone in the world like a tree without roots, like a leaf blown out to sea, like an unfledged bird that has fallen out of the nest.

Then, for the first time since that evening when she had borne false witness, her memory reverted to all she had been taught at school and in the church of the torments of hell, and she pictured the abode of the damned, and the scorching, seething Lake of fire in which murderers, heretics, false witnesses. . . .

What was that?

Had hell indeed yawned, and were the flames soaring up to the sky through the riven shell of the earth?  Had the firmament opened to pour living fire and black fumes on the northern part of the city?