“Best without me.”

“But can I live without you, Domini?  Can I wake day after day to the sunshine, and know that I shall never see you again, and go on living?  Can I do that?  I don’t feel as if it could be.  Perhaps, when I have done my penance, God will have mercy.”

“How, Boris?”

“Perhaps He will let me die.”

“Let us fix all the thoughts of our hearts on the life in which He may let us be together once more.  Look, Boris, there are lights in the darkness, there will always be lights.”

“I can’t see them,” he said.

She looked at him and saw that tears were running down his cheeks.  Again, on this last night of companionship, God summoned her to be strong for him.  On the edge of the hill, close to them, she saw a Moorish temple built of marble, with narrow arches and columns, and marble seats.

“Let us sit here for a moment, Boris,” she said.

He followed her up the marble steps.  Two or three times he stumbled, but she did not give him her hand.  They sat down between the slender columns and looked out over the city, whose blanched domes and minarets were faintly visible in the night.  Androvsky was shaken with sobs.

“How can I part from you?” he said brokenly.  “How am I to do it?  How can I—­how can I?  Why was I given this love for you, this terrible thing, this crying out, this reaching out of the flesh and heart and soul to you?  Domini—­Domini—­what does it all mean—­this mystery of torture—­this scourging of the body—­this tearing in pieces of my soul and yours?  Domini, shall we know—­shall we ever know?”

“I am sure we shall know, we shall all know some day, the meaning of the mystery of pain.  And then, perhaps, then surely, we shall each of us be glad that we have suffered.  The suffering will make the glory of our happiness.  Even now sometimes when I am suffering, Boris, I feel as if there were a kind of splendour, even a kind of nobility in what I am doing, as if I were proving my own soul, proving the force that God has put into me.  Boris, let us—­you and I—­learn to say in all this terror, ‘I am unconquered, I am unconquerable.’”

“I feel that I could say that, be it in the most frightful circumstances, if only I could sometimes see you—­even far away as now I see those lights.”

“You will see me in your prayers every day, and I shall see you in mine.”

“But the cry of the body, Domini, of the eyes, of the hands, to see, to touch—­it’s so fierce, it’s so—­it’s so—­”

“I know, I hear it too, always.  But there is another voice, which will be strong when the other has faded into eternal silence.  In all bodily things, even the most beautiful, there is something finite.  We must reach out our poor, feeble, trembling hands to the infinite.  I think everyone who is born does that through life, often without being conscious of it.  We shall do it consciously, you and I. We shall be able to do it because of our dreadful suffering.  We shall want, we shall have to do it, you—­where you are going, and I——­”