“Everything is changed nowadays.  Old age no longer forgets; it is youth that has a short memory.  Your head has long been full of other things, but I—­I still remember who it was that made my lost dear one’s last hours on earth a hell, even in view of the gates of Heaven!” Her breast heaved with feeble, tearless sobs—­a short, convulsive gasping, and Orion did not dare contravene her wishes.  He sought to soothe her with loving words and, when she recovered herself, he told her that he proposed to leave her for a short time to look after his estates, as the law required, and this information gladdened her greatly.  To be alone—­ solitary and unobserved now seemed delightful.  Those white pills did more for her, raised her spirits better, than any human society.  They brought her dreams, sleeping or waking; dreams a thousand times more delightful than her real, desolate existence.  To give herself up to memory, to pray, to dream, to picture herself in the other world among her beloved dead—­and besides that to eat and drink, which she was always ready to do very freely—­this was all she asked henceforth of life on earth.

When, to her further questions, Orion replied that he was going first to the Delta, she expressed her regret, since, if he had gone to Upper Egypt, he might have visited his sister-in-law, Mary’s mother, in her convent.  She sat up as she spoke, passed her hand across her forehead, and pointed to a little table near the head of the couch, on which, by the side of a cup with fruit syrup, phials, boxes, and other objects, lay a writing-tablet and a letter-scroll.  This she took up and handed to Orion, saying: 

“A letter from your sister-in-law.  It came last evening and I began to read it; but the first words are a complaint of your father, and that—­ you know, just before going to sleep—­I could not read any more; I could not bear it!  And to-day; first there was church, and then the physician came with his request about the child; I have not yet found courage to read the rest of it.—­What can any letter bring to me but evil!  Do you know at all whence anything pleasant could come to me?  But now:  read me the letter.  Not that part again about your father; that I will keep till presently for myself alone.”

Orion undid the roll, and with quivering lips glanced over the nun’s accusations against his father.  The wildest fanaticism breathed in every line of this epistle from the martyr’s widow.  She had found in the cloister all she sought:  she lived now, she said, in God alone and in the Divine Saviour.  She thought of her child, even, only as an alien, one of God’s young creatures for whom it was a joy to pray.  At the same time it was her duty to care for the little one’s soul, and if it were not too hard for her grandmother to part from her, she longed to see Mary once more.  She had lately been chosen abbess of her convent—­and no one could prevent her taking possession of the child; but she feared lest an overwhelming natural affection might drag her back to the carnal world, which she had for ever renounced, so she would have Mary brought up in a neighboring nunnery, and led to Heavenly joys, not to earthly misery—­to be the wife of no sinful husband, but a pure bride of Christ.