And as the words leave my lips my mind loses itself in recollections of
all the dark and harrowing and shameful scenes that I have beheld.

"Listen," I say. "You may approach a man with nothing but good in your
heart, and be prepared to surrender both your freedom and your
strength; yet still he may fail to understand you aright. And how shall
he be blamed for this, seeing that never may he have been shown what is
good?"

She lays a hand upon my shoulder, and looks straight into my eyes as
she parts her comely lips.

"True," she rejoins--"But, dear friend, it is also true that goodness
never bargains."

Together she and I seem to be drifting towards a vista which is coming
to look, as it sloughs the shadow of night, ever clearer and clearer.
It is a vista of white huts, silvery trees, a red church, and
dew-bespangled earth. And as the sun rises he reveals to us clustered,
transparent clouds which, like thousands of snow-white birds, go
gliding over our heads.

"Yes," she whispers again as gently she gives me a nudge. "As one
pursues one's lonely way one thinks and thinks--but of what? Dear
friend, you have said that no one really cares what is the matter. Ah,
HOW true that is!"

Here she springs to her feet, and, pulling me up with her, glues
herself to my breast with a vehemence which causes me momentarily to
push her away. Upon this, bursting into tears, she tends towards me
again, and kisses me with lips so dry as almost to cut me--she kisses
me in a way which penetrates to my very soul.

"You have been oh, so good!" she whispers softly. As she speaks, the
earth seems to be sinking under my feet.

Then she tears herself away, glances around the courtyard, and darts to
a corner where, under a fence, a clump of herbage is sprouting.

"Go now," she adds in a whisper. "Yes, go."

Then, with a confused smile, as, crouching among the herbage as though
it had been a small cave, she rearranges her hair, she adds:

"It has befallen so. Ah, me! May God grant unto me His pardon!"

Astonished, feeling that I must be dreaming, I gaze at her with
gratitude, for I sense an extraordinary lightness to be present in my
breast, a radiant void through which joyous, intangible words and
thoughts keep flying as swallows wheel across the firmament.

"Amid a great sorrow," she adds, "even a small joy becomes a great
felicity."

Yet as I glance at the woman's bosom, whereon moist beads are standing
like dewdrops on the