They had dressed her in a long garment of white wool. The stuff was hot. Chrysis was bathed in perspiration. She stretched her arms, yawned, and leaned herself against the lofty window.
Outside, the silvery moon shone in a sky of liquid purity, a sky so pale and clear that not a star was visible.
It was on just such a night that, seven years before, Chrysis had left the land of Gennesaret.
She remembered . . . They were five. They were sellers of ivory. Their long-tailed horses were adorned with parti-coloured tufts. They had met the child at the edge of a round cistern . . .
And before that, the blue lake, the transparent sky, the light air of the land of Galilee. . . . .
The house was environed with pink flax-plants and tamarisks. Thorny caper-bushes pricked one’s fingers when one went a-catching butterflies . . . One could almost see the wind in the undulations of the pine grasses . . .
The little girls bathed in a limpid brook where one found red shells under the flowering laurels: and there were flowers upon the water, and flowers all over the mead, and great lilacs upon the mountains, and the line of the mountain was that of a young breast . . .
Chrysis closed her eyes with a faint smile which suddenly died away. The idea of death had just occurred to her. And she felt that, until the last, she would be incapable of ceasing to think.
“Ah!” she said to herself, “what have I done? Why did I meet that man? Why did he listen to me? Why did I let myself be caught in the trap? How is it that, even now, I regret nothing?