into the tent. She did not ask him to. She did not see him in the
moonlight beyond the tent, or when the moonlight waned before the coming
of the dawn. She was upon her knees, her face hidden in her hands,
striving as surely few human beings have ever had to strive in the
difficult paths of life. At first she had felt almost calm. When she had
spoken to Androvsky there had even been a strange sensation that was not
unlike triumph in her heart. In this triumph she had felt disembodied,
as if she were a spirit standing there, removed from earthly suffering,
but able to contemplate, to understand, to pity it, removed from earthly
sin, but able to commit an action that might help to purge it.

When she said to Androvsky, "Now you can pray," she had passed into a
region where self had no existence. Her whole soul was intent upon this
man to whom she had given all the treasures of her heart and whom she
knew to be writhing as souls writhe in Purgatory. He had spoken at last,
he had laid bare his misery, his crime, he had laid bare the agony of
one who had insulted God, but who repented his insult, who had wandered
far away from God, but who could never be happy in his wandering, who
could never be at peace even in a mighty human love unless that love was
consecrated by God's contentment with it. As she stood there Domini had
had an instant of absolutely clear sight into the depths of another's
heart, another's nature. She had seen the monk in Androvsky, not
slain by his act of rejection, but alive, sorrow-stricken, quivering,
scourged. And she had been able to tell this monk--as God seemed to be
telling her, making of her his messenger--that now at last he might pray
to a God who again would hear him, as He had heard him in the garden of
El-Largani, in his cell, in the chapel, in the fields. She had been able
to do this. Then she had turned away, gone into the tent and fallen upon
her knees.

But with that personal action her sense of triumph passed away. As her
body sank down her soul seemed to sink down with it into bottomless
depths of blackness where no light had ever been, into an underworld,
airless, peopled with invisible violence. And it seemed to her as if
it was her previous flight upward which had caused this descent into a
place which had surely never before been visited by a human soul. All
the selflessness suddenly vanished from her, and was replaced by a
burning sense of her own personality, of what was due to