While she was locking the box she asked Katharina whether she had met Orion.

“Orion!” repeated the younger girl, in a tone which implied that she alone had the right to enquire about him.  “Yes, we came upstairs together; he went to see the wounded man.  Have you anything to say to him?”

She crimsoned as she spoke and looked suspiciously at Paula, who simply replied:  “Perhaps,” and then added, as she hung the ribbon with the key round her neck:  “Now, you little girls, it is breakfast time; I am not going down to-day.”

“Oh, dear!” cried Mary disappointed, “my grandfather is ailing and grandmother will stay with him; so if you do not come I shall have to sit alone with Eudoxia; for Katharina’s chariot is waiting and she must go home at once.  Oh! do come.  Just to please me; you do not know how odious Eudoxia can be when it is so hot.”

“Yes, do go down,” urged Katharina.  “What will you do up hereby yourself?  And this evening mother and I will come again.”

“Very well,” said Paula.  “But first I must go to see the invalids.”

“May I go with you?” asked the Water wagtail, coaxingly stroking Paula’s arm.  But Mary clapped her hands, exclaiming: 

“She only wants to go to Orion—­she is so fond of him. . . .”

Katharina put her hand over the child’s mouth, but Paula, with quickened breath, explained that she had very serious matters to discuss with Orion; so Katharina, turning her back on her with a hasty gesture of defiance, sulkily went down stairs, while Mary slipped down the bannister rail.  Not many days since, Katharina, who was but just sixteen, would gladly have followed her example.

Paula meanwhile knocked at the first of the sickrooms and entered it as softly as the door was opened by a nursing-sister from the convent of St. Katharine.  Orion, whom she was seeking, had been there, but had just left.

In this first room lay the leader of the caravan; in that beyond was the crazy Persian.  In a sitting-room adjoining the first room, which, being intended for guests of distinction, was furnished with royal magnificence, sat two men in earnest conversation:  the Arab merchant and Philippus the physician, a young man of little more than thirty, tall and bony, in a dress of clean but very coarse stuff without any kind of adornment.  He had a shrewd, pale face, out of which a pair of bright black eyes shone benevolently but with keen vivacity.  His large cheek-bones were much too prominent; the lower part of his face was small, ugly and, as it were, compressed, while his high broad forehead crowned the whole and stamped it as that of a thinker, as a fine cupola may crown an insignificant and homely structure.