were nothing.  There was no room in her for anything but love of Androvsky.  At this moment even her love of God seemed to have been expelled from her.  Afterwards she remembered that.  She did not think of it now.  For her there was a universe with but one figure in it—­Androvsky.  She was unconscious of herself except as love for him.  She was unconscious of any Creative Power to whom she owed the fact that he was there to be loved by her.  She was passion, and he was that to which passion flowed.

The world was the stream and the sea.

As she sat there with her hands folded on her knees, her eyes bent down, and the purple flowers all about her, she felt simplified and cleansed, as if a mass of little things had been swept from her, leaving space for the great thing that henceforth must for ever dwell within her and dominate her life.  The burning shame of which she had been conscious on the previous night, when Androvsky told her of his approaching departure and she was stricken as by a lightning flash, had died away from her utterly.  She remembered it with wonder.  How should she be ashamed of love?  She thought that it would be impossible to her to be ashamed, even if Androvsky knew all that she knew.  Just then the immense truth of her feeling conquered everything else, made every other thing seem false, and she said to herself that of truth she did not know how to be ashamed.  But with the knowledge of the immense truth of her love came the knowledge of the immense sorrow that might, that must, dwell side by side with it.

Suddenly she moved.  She lifted her eyes from the sand and looked out into the garden.  Besides this truth within her there was one other thing in the world that was true.  Androvsky was going away.  While she sat there the moments were passing.  They were making the hours that were bent upon destruction.  She was sitting in the garden now and Androvsky was close by.  A little time would pass noiselessly.  She would be sitting there and Androvsky would be far away, gone from the desert, gone out of her life no doubt for ever.  And the garden would not have changed.  Each tree would stand in its place, each flower would still give forth its scent.  The breeze would go on travelling through the lacework of the branches, the streams slipping between the sandy walls of the rills.  The inexorable sun would shine, and the desert would whisper in its blue distances of the unseen things that always dwell beyond.  And Androvsky would be gone.  Their short intercourse, so full of pain, uneasiness, reserve, so fragmentary, so troubled by abrupt violences, by ignorance, by a sense of horror even on the one side, and by an almost constant suspicion on the other, would have come to an end.