And some of these in turn loved her.
Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lustrous, deep-hued, flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.
"When she wakes us, the children never cry," said a woman whom she always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that had closed about her heart.
It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the thirst of overdriven cattle.
All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.
She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever sleep. She sought for him always;—sought the busy crowds of the living; sought the burial-grounds of the dead.
As she passed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she passed by the vast temples of art; as she passed by the open doors of the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories that it treasured; it became clearer to her—this thing of his desires, this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and endlessly yearned.
The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, "Let me only die as the reed died,—what matter,—so that only the world speak his name!"