The kiss she had sunk to robbed no one, not even her body's purity, for
when this knot was tied she consigned herself to her end, and had become
a bag of dust. The other knots in the string pointed to verifications;
this first one was a suspicion, and it was the more precious, she felt it
to be more a certainty; it had come from the dark world beyond us, where
all is known. Her belief that it had come thence was nourished by
testimony, the space of blackness wherein she had lived since, exhausting
her last vitality in a simulation of infantile happiness, which was
nothing other than the carrying on of her emotion of the moment of sharp
sour sweet--such as it may be, the doomed below attain for their
knowledge of joy--when, at the first meeting with her lover, the
perception of his treachery to the soul confiding in him, told her she
had lived, and opened out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility to her
for her heritage.
She made her tragic humility speak thankfully to the wound that slew her.
'Had it not been so, I should not have seen him,' she said:--Her lover
would not have come to her but for his pursuit of another woman.
She pardoned him for being attracted by that beautiful transplant of the
fields: pardoned her likewise. 'He when I saw him first was as beautiful
to me. For him I might have done as much.'
Far away in a lighted hall of the West, her family raised hands of
reproach.
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