to have no individuality left. He
had spoken and she had obeyed. He had commanded and she had done his
bidding. She was even more ashamed of this than of having wept, and
sobbed, and dragged herself at his feet. In the first moment she had
submitted, deluding herself with the idea she had expressed, that he
was consigning her to a prison and that her freedom was dependent on his
will. The foolish delusion vanished. She saw that she was free, when she
chose, to descend the steps she had just mounted, to go out through the
gate she had lately entered, and to go whithersoever she would, at the
mere risk of meeting Israel Kafka. And that risk she heartily despised,
being thoroughly brave by nature, and utterly indifferent to death by
force of circumstance.

She comforted herself with the thought that the Wanderer would come to
her, once at least, when she was pleased to send for him. She had that
loyal belief inseparable from true love until violently overthrown by
irrefutable evidence, and which sometimes has such power as to return
even then, overthrowing the evidence of the senses themselves. Are there
not men who trust women, and women who trust men, in spite of the vilest
betrayals? Love is indeed often the inspirer of subjective visions,
creating in the beloved object the qualities it admires and the virtues
it adores, powerless to accept what it is not willing to see, dwelling
in a fortress guarded by intangible, and therefore indestructible,
fiction and proof against the artillery of facts. Unorna's confidence
was, however, not misplaced. The man whose promise she had received had
told the truth when he had said that he had never broken any promise
whatsoever.

In this, at least, there was therefore comfort. On the morrow she would
see him again. The moment of complete despair had passed when she had
received that assurance from his lips, and as she thought of it, sitting
in the absolute stillness of her room, the proportions of the storm
grew less, and possible dimensions of a future hope greater--just as the
seafarer when his ship lies in a flat calm of the oily harbour thinks
half incredulously of the danger past, despises himself for the anxiety
he felt, and vows that on the morrow he will face the waves again,
though the winds blow ever so fiercely. In Unorna the master passion was
as strong as ever. In a dim vision the wreck of her pride floated still
in the stormy distance, but she turned her eyes away, for