grief at the loss of their murdered sons only bound the attached couple more closely, and when her husband had fallen into bad health she had gladly shared his seclusion, had devoted herself entirely to caring for him, and divided all the doubts and anxieties which came upon him from his political action.  The consciousness of being not merely much but everything to him, was her pride and her joy.  Her dislike of Paula had its rise, in the first instance, in the discovery that she, his wife, was no longer indispensable to the sufferer when he had his fair young niece’s company.  And now?

At night, after long lying awake, when she woke from a snatch of uneasy sleep, she involuntarily listened for the faint panting breath, but no heart now throbbed by her side; and when she quitted her lonely couch at dawn the coming day lay before her as a desert and treeless solitude.  By night, as by day, she constantly tried to call up the image of the dead, but whenever her small imaginative power had succeeded in doing so—­not unfrequently at first—­she had seen him as in the last moments of his life, a curse on his only son on his trembling lips.  This horrible impression deprived her of the last consolation of the mourner:  a beautiful memory, while it destroyed her proud and glad satisfaction in her only child.  The youth, who had till now been her soul’s idol, was stigmatized and branded in her eyes.  She might not ignore the burden laid on Orion by that most just man; instead of taking him to her heart with double tenderness and softening or healing the fearful punishment inflicted by his father, she could only pity him.  When Orion came to see her she would stroke his waving hair and, as she desired not to wound him and make him even more unhappy than he must be already, she neither blamed nor admonished him, and never reminded him of his father’s curse.  And how beggared was that frugal heart, accustomed to spend all its store of love on so few objects—­nay, chiefly on one alone who was now no more!

The happy voices of the children had always given her pleasure, so long as they did not disturb her suffering husband; now, they too were silent.  She had withdrawn the sunshine of her narrow affection from her only grandchild, who had hitherto held a place in it, for little Mary had had a share in the horrors that had come upon her and Orion in her husband’s last moments.  Indeed, the bereaved woman’s excited fancy had firmly conceived the mad notion that the child was the evil genius of the house and the tool of Satan.

Neforis had, however, enjoyed some hours of greater ease during the last two days.  In the misery of wakefulness which was beginning to torture her like an acute pain, she had suddenly recollected what relief from sleeplessness her husband had been wont to find in the opium pillules, and a box of the medicine, only just opened, was at hand.  And was not she, too, suffering unutterable wretchedness?  Why should she neglect the remedy which had so greatly mitigated her husband’s distress?  It was said to have a bad effect after long and frequent use, and she had often checked the Mukaukas in taking it too freely; but could her sufferings be greater?  Would she not, indeed, be thankful to the drug if it should shorten her miserable existence?