e 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, it was an infinite relief to give. If I could not
observe equal gentleness of word and manner in absolutely forbidding
her to approach, either Eunane's chamber or my own, it was because,
the moment she conceived what I was about to say, her almost indignant
revolt from the command was apparent. For the first and last time she
distinctly and firmly refused compliance, not merely with the kindly
though very decided request at first spoken, but with the formal and
peremptory command by which I endeavoured to enforce it.

"You command me to neglect a sister in peril and suffering," she said.