She let her chin rest upon one hand as she did often when she thought and when she spoke seriously. “I shall listen,” she said. “It comforts me more than ever now when I hear the hymn played in the night time—since there is seldom any one in our rooms when I awake. Joseph,” she spoke in a very low tone, “do you know I think that my uncle is possessed?” He gave a great start. “Possessed—and by whom?” “I don’t know. But he isn’t himself. It isn’t that he is out of his wits—no, not that at all. He is just as intelligent and just as kind as he ever was, but he has become so interested in something that he is doing in the loft that he thinks but little of me or of his friends in the world. There is that student, Johann Tring——” “Yes, I know,” he answered quickly. “He and my uncle are together in the loft every night. Sometimes they stay there until it is light. They say queer things, and sometimes my uncle cries out as if he were in pain. You heard them the night that I told you to go up the staircase. It is always like that.” “I told father what I heard that night,” said Joseph, “and he only said that it was none of our affair, that your uncle is a man who has been very kind to us, and who knows what he is about. Also he forbade me ever to spy upon your uncle again. Father said that your uncle is a great scholar and that he is now probably working upon something that will win him fame.” “Ay—perhaps,” she meditated—“but I loved him better as he was.” From that time on Elzbietka became more and more a part of Pan Andrew’s family. In the afternoons she used to bring her sewing downstairs into the front room and sit there for hours working and chatting or humming little tunes under her breath. When Joseph returned from his studies in the afternoon the two were accustomed to walk out into the city and see its changing wonders, its new caravans, its pageants, its companies of knights and soldiers, its processions of guilds. Often they walked out through the gates into the country where there was rich black earth, and behind them or alongside or ahead ran the great Tartar dog. The walks took them to the old Jewish city of the Kazimierz, across the fortified bridge on the west arm of the Vistula, to the old church on the Skalka, where the holy Stanislas was murdered at his altar, to the high mound above the city where it was said that old King Krakus was buried; to these and to many other places had they wandered while the sun was bright and the air not too cool. Once they went to visit the towers of the Church of Our Lady Mary in the late afternoon. The watchman let them in at the little gate at the base of the tower and they climbed up to the room where the day trumpeter was on duty. He was the man that Pan Andrew relieved at night, and he thought it a great honor to have a visit from such a little lady as Elzbietka, and he told her many of the legends which have come down from old days when the church tower was being built.