“I!  But you are different.”

“To-night I have felt—­I do feel as if there were tragedy near me, perhaps coming towards me,” she said simply, “and I am oppressed, I am almost afraid.”

When she had said it she felt happier, as if a burden she carried were suddenly lighter.  As he did not speak she glanced at him.  The moon rays lit up his face.  It looked ghastly, drawn and old, so changed that she scarcely recognised it and felt, for a moment, as if she were with a stranger.  She looked away quickly, wondering if what she had seen was merely some strange effect of the moon, or whether Androvsky was really altered for a moment by the action of some terrible grief, one of those sudden sorrows that rush upon a man from the hidden depths of his nature and tear his soul, till his whole being is lacerated and he feels as if his soul were flesh and were streaming with the blood from mortal wounds.  The silence between them was long.  In it she presently heard a reiterated noise that sounded like struggle and pain made audible.  It was Androvsky’s breathing.  In the soft and exquisite air of the desert he was gasping like a man shut up in a cellar.  She looked again towards him, startled.  As she did so he turned his horse sideways and rode away a few paces.  Then he pulled up his horse.  He was now merely a black shape upon the moonlight, motionless and inaudible.  She could not take her eyes from this shape.  Its blackness suggested to her the blackness of a gulf.  Her memory still heard that sound of deep-drawn breathing or gasping, heard it and quivered beneath it as a tender-hearted person quivers seeing a helpless creature being ill-used.  She hesitated for a moment, and then, carried away by an irresistible impulse to try to soothe this extremity of pain which she was unable to understand, she rode up to Androvsky.  When she reached him she did not know what she had meant to say or do.  She felt suddenly impotent and intrusive, and even horribly shy.  But before she had time for speech or action he turned to her and said, lifting up his hands with the reins in them and then dropping them down heavily upon his horse’s neck: 

“Madame, I wanted to tell you that to-morrow I——­” He stopped.

“Yes?” she said.

He turned his head away from her till she could not see his face.

“To-morrow I am leaving Beni-Mora.”

“To-morrow!” she said.

She did not feel the horse under her, the reins in her hand.  She did not see the desert or the moon.  Though she was looking at Androvsky she no longer perceived him.  At the sound of his words it seemed to her as if all outside things she had ever known had foundered, like a ship whose bottom is ripped up by a razor-edged rock, as if with them had foundered, too, all things within herself:  thoughts, feelings, even the bodily powers that were of the essence of her life; sense of taste, smell, hearing, sight, the capacity of movement and of deliberate repose.  Nothing seemed to remain except the knowledge that she was still alive and had spoken.