it, of what had
been done to it, of what it now was. She saw it like a cloth that had
been white and that now was stained with indelible filth. And anger came
upon her, a bitter fury, in which she was inclined to cry out, not only
against man, but against God. The strength of her nature was driven into
a wild bitterness, the sweet waters became acrid with salt. She had been
able a moment before to say to Androvsky, almost with tenderness, "Now
at last you can pray." Now she was on her knees hating him, hating--yes,
surely hating--God. It was a frightful sensation.

Soul and body felt defiled. She saw Androvsky coming into her clean
life, seizing her like a prey, rolling her in filth that could never be
cleansed. And who had allowed him to do her this deadly wrong? God. And
she was on her knees to this God who had permitted this! She was in the
attitude of worship. Her whole being rebelled against prayer. It seemed
to her as if she made a furious physical effort to rise from her knees,
but as if her body was paralysed and could not obey her will. She
remained kneeling, therefore, like a woman tied down, like a blasphemer
bound by cords in the attitude of prayer, whose soul was shrieking
insults against heaven.

Presently she remembered that outside Androvsky was praying, that she
had meant to join with him in prayer. She had contemplated, then, a
further, deeper union with him. Was she a madwoman? Was she a slave?
Was she as one of those women of history who, seized in a rape, resigned
themselves to love and obey their captors? She began to hate herself.
And still she knelt. Anyone coming in at the tent door would have seen a
woman apparently entranced in an ecstasy of worship.

This great love of hers, to what had it brought her? This awakening of
her soul, what was its meaning? God had sent a man to rouse her
from sleep that she might look down into hell. Again and again, with
ceaseless reiteration, she recalled the incidents of her passion in the
desert. She thought of the night at Arba when Androvsky blew out the
lamp. That night had been to her a night of consecration. Nothing in
her soul had risen up to warn her. No instinct, no woman's instinct, had
stayed her from unwitting sin. The sand-diviner had been wiser than she;
Count Anteoni more far-seeing; the priest of Beni-Mora more guided by
holiness, by the inner flame that flickers before the wind that blows
out of the caverns of evil. God had blinded her in or