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.