The rest of the night she lay motionless altogether.
With the gray dawn growing in the room, she rose, turned to Mara, and said, in prideful humility, “You have conquered. Let me go into the wilderness and bewail myself.”
Mara saw that her submission was not feigned, neither was it real. She looked at her a moment, and returned:
“Begin, then, and set right in the place of wrong.”
“I know not how,” she replied—with the look of one who foresaw and feared the answer.
“Open thy hand, and let that which is in it go.”
A fierce refusal seemed to struggle for passage, but she kept it prisoned.
“I cannot,” she said. “I have no longer the power. Open it for me.”
She held out the offending hand. It was more a paw than a hand. It seemed to me plain that she could not open it.
Mara did not even look at it.