“What is youth or sex or beauty in the All-Commander’s sight? 
For the arm that smote and spared not, shall His wisdom spare to smite? 
Yet, love redeems the loving; yet in thy need avail
The Soul whose light surrounds thee, the faith that will not fail. 
Thy lips shall soothe the terror, call to yon couch afar
The solace of the Serpent, the shadow of the Star! 
Strength shall sustain the strengthless, nor the soft hand loose its
grasp
Of the hand it trusts and clings to—­till another meet its clasp.... 
—­Steel-hard to man’s last anguish, wax-soft to woman’s mood!—­
Death quits not the death-dealer; blood haunts the life of blood!”

* * * * *

Returning to the peristyle, I encountered Eveena, who had been seeking me anxiously.  Much alarmed for her, I bade her return at once to her room.  She obeyed as of course, equally of course surprised and a little mortified; while I, marvelling by what conceivable means the plague of Cairo or Constantinople could have been conveyed across forty million miles of space and some two years of Earthly time, paced the peristyle for a few minutes.  As I did so, my eye fell on the roses which grew just where chance arrested my steps.  If they do not afford an explanation which scientific medicine will admit, I can suggest no other.  But, if it were so, how fearfully true the warning!—­by what a mysterious fate did death dog my footsteps, and “blood haunt the life of blood!”

The reader may not remember that the central chamber of the women’s apartments, next to which was Eunane’s, had been left vacant.  This I determined to occupy myself, and bade the girls remove at once to those on its right, as yet unallotted.  I closed the room, threw off my dress, and endeavoured by means of the perfumed shower-bath to drive from my person what traces of the infection might cling to it; for Eveena had the keys of all my cases and of the medicine-chest, and I could not make up my mind to reclaim them by a simple unexplained message sent by an amba, or, still worse, by the hands of Enva or Eive.  I laid the clothes I had worn on one of the shelves of the wall, closing over them the crystal doors of the sunken cupboard; and, having obtained through the amban a dress which I had not worn since my return, and which therefore could hardly have about it any trace of infection, I sought Eveena in her own room.

That something had gone wrong, and gravely wrong, she could not but know; and I found her silent and calm, indeed, but weeping bitterly, whether for the apprehension of danger to me, or for what seemed want of trust in her.  I asked her for the keys, and she gave them; but with a mute appeal that made the concealment I desired, however necessary, no longer possible.  Gently, cautiously as I could, but softening, not hiding, any part of the truth, I gave her the full confidence to which she was entitled, and which, once forced out of the silence preserved for her sake,