She had come thither, hoping to leave
behind her on the desert wind that alien care, that new, strange
passion, which sapped her strength, and stung her pride, and made her
evil with such murderous lust of vengeance; and they were with her
still. Only something of the deadly, biting ferocity of jealousy had
changed into a passionate longing to be as that woman was who had his
love; into a certain hopeless, sickening sense of having forever lost
that which alone could have given her such beauty and such honor in the
sight of men as those this woman had.
To her it seemed impossible that this patrician who had his passion
should not return it. To the child of the camp, though she often mocked
at caste, all the inexorable rules, all the reticent instincts of
caste, were things unknown. She would have failed to comprehend all the
thousand reasons which would have forbidden any bond between the great
aristocrat and a man of low grade and of dubious name. She only thought
of love as she had always seen it, quickly born, hotly cherished, wildly
indulged, and without tie or restraint.
"And I came without my vengeance!" she mused. To the nature that felt
the ferocity of the vendetta a right and a due, there was wounding
humiliation in her knowledge that she had left her rival unharmed, and
had come hither, out from his sight and his presence, lest he should
see in her one glimpse of that folly which she would have killed herself
under her own steel rather than have been betrayed, either for his
contempt or his compassion.
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