for a
century, then at last beat again somewhere up in her throat, choking her.
Something--could Gaspare have seen what? She moved on a step. One of her
feet was on the wall, the other still on the firm earth. She leaned down
and tried to look over into the sea beyond, the sea close to the wall.
But her head swam. Had she not moved back hastily, obedient to an
imperious instinct of self-preservation, she would have fallen. She sat
down, there where she had been standing, and dropped her face into her
hands close to her knees, and kept quite still. She felt as if she were
in a train going through a tunnel. Her ears were full of a roaring
clamor. How long she sat and heard tumult she did not know. When she
looked up the night seemed to her to be much darker than before,
intensely dark. Yet all the stars were there in the sky. No clouds had
come to hide them. She tried to get up quickly, but there was surely
something wrong with her body. It would not obey her will at first.
Presently she lay down, turned over on her side, put both hands on the
ground, and with an effort, awkward as that of a cripple, hoisted herself
up and stood on her feet. Gaspare had said, "Wait in the road." She must
find the road. That was what she must do.

"Wait in the road--wait in the road." She kept on saying that to herself.
But she could not remember for a moment where the road was. She could
only think of rock, of water black like ebony. The road was white. She
must look for something white. And when she found it she must wait.
Presently, while she thought she was looking, she found that she was
walking in the dust. It flew up into her nostrils, dry and acrid. Then
she began to recover herself and to realize more clearly what she was
doing.

She did not know yet. She knew nothing yet. The night was dark, the sea
was dark. Gaspare had only cast one swift glance down before his foot had
slipped. It was impossible that he could have seen what it was that was
there in the water. And she was always inclined to let her imagination
run riot. God isn't cruel. She had said that under the oak-trees, and it
was true. It must be true.

"I've never done God any harm," she was saying to herself now. "I've
never meant to. I've always tried to do the right thing. God knows that!
God wouldn't be cruel to me."

In this moment all the subtlety of her mind deserted her, all that in her
might have been called "cleverness." She was reduced to an extraordinary