Meanwhile the camp had been struck, and the first stage of the journey northward, the journey back, had been accomplished.  Domini had given the order of departure, but she had first spoken with Androvsky.

After his narrative, and her words that followed it, he did not come 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 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.