“What else can I do?” she repeated in a lower voice.
It seemed to her that he was deliberately pressing her down into the uttermost darkness.
“You will not go.”
“Yes, I shall go.”
She spoke with conviction. Even in that moment—most of all in that moment—she knew that she would obey the summons of the desert.
“I—I shall never know the desert,” he said. “I thought—it seemed to me that I, too, should go out into it. I have wanted to go. You have made me want to go.”
“I?”
“Yes. Once you said to me that peace must dwell out there. It was on the tower the—the first time you ever spoke to me.”
“I remember.”
“I wondered—I often wonder why you spoke to me.”