To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as it is to the dog to track his master's wanderings.
She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a thing that was vile.
But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion's rage and humble as the camel's endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands, but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.
She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.
He had said that he would leave at dawn.
In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the river where he dwelt.
She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too, she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his eyes would kill her.
It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and feeble limbs through the long grasses of the shore and reached the ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the spaces in the stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that the place was desolate.
The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the pigments and tools and articles of an artist's store, were gone; but the figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the stone.
She entered and looked at them.