What did she seek to do?
She paused on a little slip of moss-green timber that crossed the water in the open plain, and looked down at herself in the shining stream. None desired her—none remembered her; none said to her, "Stay with us a little, for love's sake."
"Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against me!" she thought; and she pondered wearily in her heart where her sin against them could lie. That brief delirious trance of joy that had come to her with the setting of the last day's sun, had with the sun sunk away. The visions which had haunted her sleep under the thorn-tree whilst the thrush sang, had been killed under the cold and bitterness of the waking world. She wondered, while her face burned red with shame, what she had been mad enough to dream of in that sweet cruel slumber. For him—she felt that sooner than again look upward to his eyes she would die by a thousand deaths.
What was she to him?—a barbarous, worthless, and unlovely thing, whose very service was despised, whose very sacrifice was condemned.
"I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, I might be fair in his sight one hour!" she thought; and she was conscious of horror or of impiety in the ghastly desire, because she had but one religion, this—her love.
She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on the root of an old oak on the edge of the fields of poppies.
The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright moon on the edge of the plain. The cresset-lights of the cathedral glowed through the dusk. All was purple and gray and still. There were the scents of heavy earths and of wild thymes, and the breath of grazing herds. The little hamlets were but patches of darker shade on the soft brown shadows of the night. White sea-mists, curling and rising, chased each other over the dim world.
She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand.
She could not weep, as other creatures could. The hours drew on. She had no home to go to; but it was not for this that she sorrowed.
Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled through the gloom. A rabbit fled across the path. The boughs were put aside by a human hand; Arslàn came out from the darkness of the woods before her.