wer, the nothingness of the splendid gifts
with which she approached it, and that she might not tread the dusty
floor of this wretched hovel but in all humility, and to crave a pardon.

The room into which she looked was low but not very small, and obtained
from two cross lights a strange and unequal illumination; on one side
the light came through the door, and on the other through an opening in
the time-worn ceiling of the room, which had never before harbored so
many and such different guests.

All attention was concentrated on a group, which was clearly lighted up
from the doorway.

On the dusty floor of the room cowered an old woman, with dark
weather-beaten features and tangled hair that had long been grey. Her
black-blue cotton shirt was open over her withered bosom, and showed a
blue star tattooed upon it.

In her lap she supported with her hands the head of a girl, whose
slender body lay motionless on a narrow, ragged mat. The little white
feet of the sick girl almost touched the threshold. Near to them
squatted a benevolent-looking old man, who wore only a coarse apron, and
sitting all in a heap, bent forward now and then, rubbing the child's
feet with his lean hands and muttering a few words to himself.

The sufferer wore nothing but a short petticoat of coarse light-blue
stuff. Her face, half resting on the lap of the old woman, was graceful
and regular in form, her eyes were half shut-like those of a child,
whose soul is wrapped in some sweet dream-but from her finely chiselled
lips there escaped from time to time a painful, almost convulsive sob.

An abundance of soft, but disordered reddish fair hair, in which clung
a few withered flowers, fell over the lap of the old woman and on to
the mat where she lay. Her cheeks were white and rosy-red, and when
the young surgeon Nebsecht--who sat by her side, near his blind, stupid
companion, the litany-singer--lifted the ragged cloth that had been
thrown over her bosom, which had been crushed by the chariot wheel, or
when she lifted her slender arm, it was seen that she had the shining
fairness of those daughters of the north who not unfrequently came to
Thebes among the king's prisoners of war.

The two physicians sent hither from the House of Seti sat on the left
side of the maiden on a little carpet. From time to time one or the
other laid his hand over the heart of the sufferer, or listened to her
breathing, or opened his case of medicaments, and moisten