Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes of death as children in their mother's.
The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her and beyond her.
All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the passionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as the sound of a hare's step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel, broke the silence.
The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her—mysterious, unreal.
She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead. And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide from his and every eye.
She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.
The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of his reproaches stung her with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.
She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might he to her say hereafter, "You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music arisen,"—and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.
Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets of elder and thorn—where she had made her bed in her childhood many a summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the mill-house;—there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.
In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that she slept folded close in the arms of Arslàn, and in her dreams she felt the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.