While he hastily arranged his hair and had his shoes clasped he felt vexed that, under the influence of that foolish dream, and still half asleep, he had let his mother go before ascertaining what the circumstances were that had given rise to his father’s anxiety.  Had it anything to do with the incidents of the past night?  No.—­If he had been suspected his mother would have told him and warned him.  It must refer to something else.  Perhaps the old merchant’s stalwart headman had died of his wounds, and his father wished to send him—­Orion—­across the Nile to the Arab viceroy to obtain forgiveness for the murder of a Moslem, actually within the precincts of the governor’s house.  This fatal blow might indeed entail serious consequences; however, the matter might very likely be quite other than this.

When he left his room the brooding heat that filled the house struck him as peculiarly oppressive, and a painful feeling, closely resembling shame, stole over him as he crossed the viridarium, and glanced at the grass from which—­thanks to Paula’s ill-meant warning—­he had carefully brushed away his foot-marks before daybreak.  How cowardly, how base, it all was The best of all in life:  honor, self-respect, the proud consciousness of being an honest man—­all staked and all lost for nothing at all!  He could have slapped his own face or cried aloud like a child that has broken its most treasured toy.  But of what use was all this?  What was done could not be undone; and now he must keep his wits about him so as to remain, in the eyes of others at least, what he had always been, low as he had fallen in his own.

It was scorchingly hot in the enclosed garden-plot, surrounded by buildings, and open to the sun; not a human creature was in sight; the house seemed dead.  The gaudy flag-staffs and trellis-work, and the pillars of the verandah, which had all been newly painted in honor of his return and were still wreathed with garlands, exhaled a smell, to him quite sickening, of melting resin, drying varnish and faded flowers.  Though there was no breath of air the atmosphere quivered, as it seemed from the fierce rays of the sun, which were reflected like arrows from everything around him.  The butterflies and dragonflies appeared to Orion to move their wings more languidly as they hovered over the plants and flowers, the very fountain danced up more lazily and not so high as usual:  everything about him was hot, sweltering, oppressive; and the man who had always been so independent and looked up to, who for years had been free to career through life uncontrolled, and guarded by every good Genius now felt trammelled, hemmed in and harassed.

In his father’s cool fountain-room he could breathe more freely; but only for a moment.  The blood faded from his cheeks, and he had to make a strong effort to greet his father calmly and in his usual manner; for in front of the divan where the governor commonly reclined, lay the Persian hanging, and close by stood his mother and the Arab merchant.  Sebek, the steward awaited his master’s orders, in the background in the attitude of humility which was torture to his old back, but in which he was never required to remain:  Orion now signed to him to stand up: