The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy warmth of the early morning.
She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among his fellows—and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest shame that his life had ever known.
"What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?" he had cried out against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked, she had laid on him the debt of life.
If ever he should know——
She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn of his reproaches.
He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the old Hellenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves, to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as Adrastus upon Atys.
On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth, chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian skies.
She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.
She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of a leaf, under a night-bird's passage, every motion of the water, as the willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great guilt was on her soul.
Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat. She saw "no snakes but the keen stars," which looked on her cold and luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslàn.