It was a level, green, silent country which was round her, with little loveliness and little color; but as she went she laughed incessantly in the delirious gladness of her liberty.
She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapors of the rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cluster of loose apple-blossoms between her eyes, she could no longer bear the passionate pain of all the long-lost sweetness, but, flinging herself downward, sobbed with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.
The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.
"Ah, God!" she thought, "I know now—one cannot be utterly wretched whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."
And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with their eyes downward, and their ears choked with the dust, hearkening so little to the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little to the passage of the clouds against the sun.
When the first blindness and rapture of her liberty had a little passed away, and abated in violence, she stood in the midst of the green fields and the fresh woods, a strange, sad, lonely figure of absolute desolation.
Her clothes were in rags; her red girdle had been changed by weather to a dusky purple; her thick clustering hair had been cut to her throat; her radiant hues were blanched, and her immense eyes gazed woefully from beneath their heavy dreamy lids, like the eyes of an antelope whom men vainly starve in the attempt to tame.
She knew neither where to go nor what to do. She had not a coin nor a crust upon her. She could not tell where she then stood, nor where the only home that she had ever known might lie.
She had not a friend on earth; and she was seventeen years old, and was beautiful, and was a woman.
She stood and looked; she did not weep; she did not pray; her heart seemed frozen in her. She had the gift she had craved,—and how could she use it?