She went back to her seat and fell into an attitude of despair.  The reaction from the great physical efforts she had made overcame her.  It seemed to her that Keyork’s only reason for taking him away must be that he was dead.  Her head throbbed and her eyes began to burn.  The great passion had its will of her and stabbed her through and through with such pain as she had never dreamed of.  The horror of it all was too deep for tears, and tears were by nature very far from her eyes at all times.  She pressed her hands to her breast and rocked herself gently backwards and forwards.  There was no reason left in her.  To her there was no reason left in anything if he were gone.  And if Keyork Arabian could not cure him, who could?  She knew now what that old prophecy had meant, when they had told her that love would come but once, and that the chief danger of her life lay in a mistake on that decisive day.  Love had indeed come upon her like a whirlwind, he had flashed upon her like the lightning, she had tried to grasp him and keep him, and he was gone again—­for ever.  Gone through her own fault, through her senseless folly in trying to do by art what love would have done for himself.  Blind, insensate, mad!  She cursed herself with unholy curses, and her beautiful face was strained and distorted.  With unconscious fingers she tore at her heavy hair until it fell about her like a curtain.  In the raging thirst of a great grief for tears that would not flow she beat her bosom, she beat her face, she struck with her white forehead the heavy table before her, she grasped her own throat, as though she would tear the life out of herself.  Then again her head fell forward and her body swayed regularly to and fro, and low words broke fiercely from her trembling lips now and then, bitter words of a wild, strong language in which it is easier to curse than to bless.  As the sudden love that had in a few hours taken such complete possession of her was boundless, so its consequences were illimitable.  In a nature strange to fear, the fear for another wrought a fearful revolution.  Her anger against herself was as terrible as her fear for him she loved was paralysing.  The instinct to act, the terror lest it should be too late, the impossibility of acting at all so long as she was imprisoned in the room, all three came over her at once.

The mechanical effort of rocking her body from side to side brought no rest; the blow she struck upon her breast in her frenzy she felt no more than the oaken door had felt those she had dealt it with the club.  She could not find even the soothing antidote of bodily pain for her intense moral suffering.  Again the time passed without her knowing or guessing of its passage.

Driven to desperation she sprang at last from her seat and cried aloud.

“I would give my soul to know that he is safe!”

The words had not died away when a low groan passed, as it were, round the room.  The sound was distinctly that of a human voice, but it seemed to come from all sides at once.  Unorna stood still and listened.