She had for once no remembrance of him; nor any other sense save of this surpassing wonder which had thus burst on her—this miracle that had been near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions dreamed.
She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.
There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked the slow tears gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.
He waited awhile; then he spoke to her:
"Since it pains you come away."
A great sob shuddered through her.
"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? Pain?—it is life, heaven, liberty!"
For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and which had been scarcely more to her than they were to the deaf and the dumb, became real to her with a thousand meanings. Men use them unconsciously, figuring by them all the marvels of their existence, all the agonies of their emotions, all the mysteries of their pangs and passions, for which they have no other names; even so she used them now in the tumult of awe, in the torture of joy, that possessed her.
Arslàn looked at her, and let her be.
Passionless himself, except in the pursuit of his art, the passions of this untrained and intense nature had interest for him—the cold interest of analysis and dissection, not of sympathy. As he portrayed her physical beauty scarcely moved by its flush of color and grace of mould, so he pursued the development of her mind searchingly, but with little pity and little tenderness.