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 order that she might fall, had brought Androvsky to her in order that her religion, her Catholic faith, might be made hideous to her for ever.  She trembled all over as she knelt.  Her life had been sad, even tormented.  And she had set out upon a pilgrimage to find peace.  She had been led to Beni-Mora.  She remembered her arrival in Africa, its spell descending upon her, her sensation of being far off, of having left her former life with its sorrows for ever.  She remembered the entrancing quiet of Count Anteoni’s garden, how as she entered it she seemed to be entering an earthly Paradise, a place prepared by God for one who was weary as she was weary, for one who longed to be renewed as she longed to be renewed.  And in that Paradise, in the inmost recess of it, she had put her hands against Androvsky’s temples and given her life, her fate, her heart into his keeping.  That was why the garden was there, that she might be led to commit this frightful action in it.  Her soul felt physically sick.  As to her body—­but just then she scarcely thought of the body.  For