She would
look at me with eyes that laughed despite the resolution of the mouth.
Then the eyes would grow pitiful at my helplessness, and she would murmur
my name. There was some reason which I never fathomed why she could not
give me the water, and her own suffering seemed greater than mine because
of it. So great did it seem that I forgot my own and sought to comfort
her. Then she would go away, very slowly, and I would hear her calling
to me in the wind, from the stars to which I looked up from the prairie.
It was she, I thought, who ordered the world. Who, when women were lost
and men cried out in distress, came to them calmly, ministered to them
deftly.
Once--perhaps a score of times, I cannot tell--was limned on the ceiling,
where the cracks were, her miniature, and I knew what was coming and
shuddered and cried aloud because I could not stop it. I saw the narrow
street of a strange city deep down between high houses,--houses with
gratings on the lowest windows, with studded, evil-looking doors, with
upper stories that toppled over to shut out the light of the sky, with
slated roofs that slanted and twisted this way and that and dormers
peeping from them. Down in the street, instead of the King's white
soldiers, was a foul, unkempt rabble, creeping out of its damp places,
jesting, cursing, singing.
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