And then, being untried and very young, she slipped to her knees and fell unconscious, with her face upon her outstretched arms. And there she lay whilst the silence of the coming dawn fell upon the earth, and wrapped itself in a soft winding-sheet about him who lay asleep upon his couch of death, at the foot of which stood his friend, looking down upon the peaceful face.
Only a few moments had slipped into eternity when Damaris shivered and, bewildered, not knowing if an hour or a second had passed whilst she had lain senseless, rose to her knees.
There was no sound.
She sat back and pushed the hair from her forehead; then rose and tiptoed to the curtain. She put out her hand, and drew back; then, urged by a desire which clamoured for definite knowledge, parted the curtain and looked in. She looked for just one second, then staggered back and back as far as the crystal basin filled with the clear water which was used in prayer; and she stood with her arms outstretched, and fingers spread between her eyes, and the picture she herself had painted in the thoughtlessness of youth, and then swung round, with her back to the Tent of Death and looked down into the water, and, as though a veil had been lifted from before her eyes, looked back along the past, and forward into the future.
As in a flash she saw the wreck she had made of her life by throwing away the substance of a good man's love for the fantastic conviction that, as she was not as other girls, she must therefore go a-venturing through the world's mazy high-ways and by-ways until she had found her own particular niche.
She saw the picture of herself proclaiming it to her life by throwing away the substance of a good man's godmother's letter of invitation to Egypt. She saw the girl's lips moving. What was she saying?
"I want to find my own nail and hang for one hour by myself, if it's on a barn door or the wall of a mosque—as long as I am by myself."
Then the picture faded, to give place to another in which she saw herself sitting in the moonlight beside Ben Kelham; the honest, slow, lovable man standing at that very moment a grim picture of despair, divided only by a curtain from her, through whom, indirectly, he had killed his friend.
What was she saying to him in this dream-picture?
"I don't know enough to marry; I want to know what love really is, first . . ."