"Go now," she adds in a whisper. "Yes, go."
Then, with a confused smile, as, crouching among the herbage as though it had been a small cave, she rearranges her hair, she adds:
"It has befallen so. Ah, me! May God grant unto me His pardon!"
Astonished, feeling that I must be dreaming, I gaze at her with gratitude, for I sense an extraordinary lightness to be present in my breast, a radiant void through which joyous, intangible words and thoughts keep flying as swallows wheel across the firmament.
"Amid a great sorrow," she adds, "even a small joy becomes a great felicity."
Yet as I glance at the woman's bosom, whereon moist beads are standing like dewdrops on the outer earth; as I glance at that bosom, whereon the sun's rays are finding a roseate reflection, as though the blood were oozing through the skin, my rapture dies away, and turns to sorrow, heartache, and tears. For in me there is a presentiment that before the living juice within that bosom shall have borne fruit, it will have become dried up.
Presently, in a tone almost of self-excuse, and one wherein the words sound a little sadly, she continues:
"Times there are when something comes pouring into my soul which makes my breasts ache with the pain of it. What is there for me to do at such moments save reveal my thoughts to the moon, or, in the daytime, to a river? Oh God in Heaven! And afterwards I feel as ashamed of myself!... Do not look at me like that. Why stare at me with those eyes, eyes so like the eyes of a child?"
"YOUR face, rather, is like a child's," I remark.
"What? Is it so stupid?"