What did it matter?
Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body and mind both died forever, what would it benefit all those whom he had slain?—the little fair birds, poisoned in their song; the little sickly children, starved in the long winters; the miserable women, hunted to their graves for some small debt of fuel or bread; the wretched poor, mocked in their famine by his greed and gain?
It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged him, and turned the hard excellence of his life to stone: but none the less had it been woe to them to fall and perish, because his hand would never spare, his heart would never soften.
Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and lose all things for a dream of God; and then at the last, upon his death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.
"It is so cruel! It is so cruel!" she muttered, where she sat with dry eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.
And she had reason.
For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;—the Faith, whatever its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh, drowns him.
CHAPTER IV.
The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth, lest she should meet the eyes of Arslàn.