therto preserved as
carefully as if it were a talisman.

She pressed the token, which was sewn into a little bag, to her lips, and
thought of her paternal home, and her brothers and sisters.

Meanwhile the sun mounted higher and higher: she wandered from rock to
rock in search of a shady spot and a spring of water, but none was to be
found, and she was tormented with violent thirst and aching hunger. By
mid-day the strips of shade too had vanished, where she had found shelter
from the rays of the sun, which now beat down unmercifully on her un
protected head. Her forehead and neck began to tingle violently, and she
fled before the burning beams like a soldier before the shafts of his
pursuer. Behind the rocks which hemmed in the plateau on which Paulus met
her, at last, when she was quite exhausted, she found a shady
resting-place. The greyhound lay panting in her lap, and held up its
broken paw, which she had carefully bound up in the morning when she had
first sat down to rest, with a strip of stuff that she had torn with the
help of her teeth from her under-garment. She now bound it up afresh, and
nursed the little creature, caressing it like an infant. The dog was as
wretched and suffering as herself, and besides it was the only being
that, in spite of her helplessness, she could cherish and be dear to. But
ere long she lost the power even to speak caressing words or to stir a
hand to stroke the dog. It slipped off her lap and limped away, while she
sat staring blankly before her, and at last forgot her sufferings in an
uneasy slumber, till she was roused by Iambe's barking and the
Alexandrian's footstep. Almost half-dead, her mouth parched and brain on
fire, while her thoughts whirled in confusion, she believed that
Phoebicius had found her track, and was come to seize her. She had
already noted the deep precipice to the edge of which she now fled, fully
resolved to fling herself over into the depths below, rather than to
surrender herself prisoner.

Paulus had rescued her from the fall, but now--as he came up to her with
two pieces of stone which were slightly hollowed, so that he had been
able to bring some fresh water in them, and which he held level with
great difficulty, walking with the greatest care--he thought that
inexorable death had only too soon returned to claim the victim he had
snatched from him, for Sirona's head hung down upon her breast, her face
was sunk towards her lap, and at the back of her