Luclarion took Desire up-stairs.
The girl was lying, in a clean night-dress, in a clean, white bed. Her hair, dark and beautiful, was combed and braided away from her face, and lay back, in two long, heavy plaits, across the pillow. Her features were sharp, but delicate, and were meant to have been pretty. But her eyes! Out of them a suffering demon seemed to look, with a still, hopeless rage.
Desire came up to the bedside.
"What do you want?" the girl said, slowly, with a deep, hard, resentful scorn in her voice. "Have you come to see what it is all like? Do you want to feel how clean you are beside me? That's a part of it; the way they torment."
It was like the cry of the devil out of the man against the Son of God.
"No," said Desire, just as slowly, in her turn. "I can only feel the cleanness in you that is making you suffer against the sin. The badness doesn't belong to you. Let it go, and begin again."
It was the word of the Lord,—"Hold thy peace, and come out of him." Desire Ledwith spoke as she was that minute moved of the Spirit. The touch of power went down through all the misery and badness, to the woman's soul, that knew itself to be just clean enough for agony. She turned her eyes, with the fiery gloom in them, away, pressing her forehead down against the pillow.
"God sees it better than I do," said Desire, gently.
An arm flung itself out from under the bedclothes, thrusting them off. The head rolled itself over, with the face away.
"God! Pf!"