Then about this warden also Guivric walked widdershins, in a complete circle.
“Issachar is a large-limbed ass,” said Guivric, soberly. “He has become a servant under taskwork. Yet his is the circumambulation.”
Whereafter Guivric still went onward, into the next room: and Guivric’s feet now glittered each with a pallid halo, for in that instant he had trodden very near to God, and glory clung to them.
And in this room, which was hung with green and rose-color, white pigeons were walking about and eating barley. In the midst of the room a woman was burning violets and white rose-petals and olive wood in a new earthen dish. She arose from this employment, smiling. And her loveliness was not a matter of mere color and shaping, such as may be found elsewhere in material things: rather, was this loveliness a light which lived and was kindly.
Now this dear woman too began, “It is needful—”
“I think it is not at all needful, madame, to explain what human faculty you would exhort me to exercise.”
Guivric said this with a gallant frivolity: and yet he was trembling.
And after a while of looking at him somewhat sadly, the woman asked, “Do you not, then, remember me?”
“It is a strange thing, madame,” he answered, “it is a very strange thing that I should so poignantly remember you whom I have not ever seen before to-day. For I am shaken by old and terrible memories, I am troubled by the greatness of ancient losses not ever to be atoned for, in the exact moment that I cannot, for the life of me, say what these memories and these losses are.”
“You have loved me,—not once, but many times, my appointed lover.”