Its blackness suggested to her the blackness
of a gulf. Her memory still heard that sound of deep-drawn breathing
or gasping, heard it and quivered beneath it as a tender-hearted person
quivers seeing a helpless creature being ill-used. She hesitated for
a moment, and then, carried away by an irresistible impulse to try to
soothe this extremity of pain which she was unable to understand, she
rode up to Androvsky. When she reached him she did not know what she had
meant to say or do. She felt suddenly impotent and intrusive, and even
horribly shy. But before she had time for speech or action he turned
to her and said, lifting up his hands with the reins in them and then
dropping them down heavily upon his horse's neck:

"Madame, I wanted to tell you that to-morrow I----" He stopped.

"Yes?" she said.

He turned his head away from her till she could not see his face.

"To-morrow I am leaving Beni-Mora."

"To-morrow!" she said.

She did not feel the horse under her, the reins in her hand. She did not
see the desert or the moon. Though she was looking at Androvsky she no
longer perceived him. At the sound of his words it seemed to her as if
all outside things she had ever known had foundered, like a ship
whose bottom is ripped up by a razor-edged rock, as if with them had
foundered, too, all things within herself: thoughts, feelings, even
the bodily powers that were of the essence of her life; sense of taste,
smell, hearing, sight, the capacity of movement and of deliberate
repose. Nothing seemed to remain except the knowledge that she was still
alive and had spoken.

"Yes, to-morrow I shall go away."

His face was still turned from her, and his voice sounded as if it spoke
to someone at a distance, someone who could hear as man cannot hear.

"To-morrow," she repeated.

She knew she had spoken again, but it did not seem to her as if she had
heard herself speak. She looked at her hands holding the reins, knew
that she looked at them, yet felt as if she were not seeing them while
she did so. The moonlit desert was surely flickering round her, and away
to the horizon in waves that were caused by the disappearance of that
ship which had suddenly foundered with all its countless lives. And she
knew of the movement of these waves as the soul of one of the drowned,
already released from the body, might know of the movement on the
surface of the sea beneath which its body was hidden.

But the soul was evidently nothin