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 But as fear paralyses the feeble, so it nerves the courageous; she was brave, and she did not let her fear conquer her compassion. And she was afraid of the strangers coming as Sanctis had come, afraid of the greed of the labourers on the moors and the hills if it were known that there was something here strange and worth seeing; and if such as these came, then after them would come the guards. These thoughts kept her anxious and awake all through that long night; she sat by the sick man's bed on the stone chair sculptured there for the dead Etrurians to occupy, and listened to his disjointed, wandering speech, and watched the oil flame flicker in the lamp that had been fashioned by hands lifeless three thousand years before.

She knew his malady to be that deadly scourge of the soil, called the perniciosa; that terrible fever which seems to have joined hands with frost and fire. Twice the fatal fit came on him; the ceaseless shivering and trembling, the blue pinched cold, the bloodless icy collapse of the whole tortured body. The third seizure would mean death, she knew. Raging heat, as though his flesh were melting in a furnace, followed, and held