hung straight down: a mass of ebony touched by the red gleams of
the fire. He stood unyielding under the strain, as solid and motionless
as one of the big trees of the surrounding forests; and his eyes
looked at the modelling of her chin, at the outline of her neck, at
the swelling lines of her bosom, with the famished and concentrated
expression of a starving man looking at food. She drew herself up to him
and rubbed her head against his cheek slowly and gently. He sighed. She,
with her hands still on his shoulders, glanced up at the placid stars
and said--

"The night is half gone. We shall finish it by this fire. By this
fire you shall tell me all: your words and Syed Abdulla's words; and
listening to you I shall forget the three days--because I am good. Tell
me--am I good?"

He said "Yes" dreamily, and she ran off towards the big house.

When she came back, balancing a roll of fine mats on her head, he had
replenished the fire and was ready to help her in arranging a couch
on the side of it nearest to the hut. She sank down with a quick but
gracefully controlled movement, and he threw himself full length with
impatient haste, as if he wished to forestall somebody. She took his
head on her knees, and when he felt her hands touching his face, her
fingers playing with his hair, he had an expression of being taken
possession of; he experienced a sense of peace, of rest, of happiness,
and of soothing delight. His hands strayed upwards about her neck, and
he drew her down so as to have her face above his. Then he whispered--"I
wish I could die like this--now!" She looked at him with her big sombre
eyes, in which there was no responsive light. His thought was so remote
from her understanding that she let the words pass by unnoticed, like
the breath of the wind, like the flight of a cloud. Woman though
she was, she could not comprehend, in her simplicity, the tremendous
compliment of that speech, that whisper of deadly happiness, so
sincere, so spontaneous, coming so straight from the heart--like every
corruption. It was the voice of madness, of a delirious peace, of
happiness that is infamous, cowardly, and so exquisite that the debased
mind refuses to contemplate its termination: for to the victims of such
happiness the moment of its ceasing is the beginning afresh of that
torture which is its price.

With her brows slightly knitted in the determined preoccupation of her
own desires, she said--

"Now tell me all. Al