A herdswoman, entering with the loud, harsh clash of brazen pails, kicked her in the loins, and rated her furiously for daring to rest there. She arose at the kick, and went out from the place passively, not well knowing what she did.
The morning was warm and radiant; the earth and the trees were dripping with the rains of the night; the air was full of sweet odors, and of a delicious coldness. As far as she saw there was no token far or near of the gleaming cloud of the city of her dreams. She ventured to ask at a wayside cabin if she were near to or far from Paris.
The woman of the cottage looked up searchingly from the seat before the porch, and for answer cried to her: "Paris! pouf—f—f! get out, you drowned rat."
She had lost for the time the mental force, and even the physical force to resent or to persevere; she was weak with hunger and bewildered with her misery. She had only sense enough left to remember—and be thankful—that in the night that was past she had been strong.
The sun beat on her head, the road was hard, and sharp-set with flint; she was full of pain, her brain throbbed with fever and reeled with weakness; a sudden horror seized her lest she might die before she had looked again on the face of Arslàn.
She saw the dusky shade of a green wood; by sheer instinct she crept into it as a stricken deer into its sanctuary.
She sat in the darkness of the trees in the coolness of the wood, and rested her head on her hands, and let the big salt tears drop one by one, as the death tears of the llama fall.
This was the young year round her; that she knew.
The winter had gone by; its many months had passed over her head whilst she was senseless to any flight of night or day; death might have taken the prey which it had once been robbed of by her; in all this weary season, which to her was as a blank, his old foes of failure and famine might have struggled for and vanquished him, she not being by; his body might lie in any plague-ditch of the nameless poor, his hand might rot fleshless and nerveless in any pit where the world cast its useless and dishonored dead; the mould of his brain might make a feast for eyeless worms, not more stone blind than was the human race he had essayed to serve; the beauty of his face might be a thing of loathsomeness from which a toad would turn. Oh, God! would death never take her likewise? Was she an outcast even from that one tribeless and uncounted nation of the dead?
That god whom she had loved, whom she had chosen, whose eyes had been so full of pity, whose voice had murmured: "Nay, the wise know me as man's only friend":—even he, Thanatos, had turned against her and abandoned her.