Then they became one with it, and were lost in
the dreamlike radiance of the morning. But she did not move. She sat
with her eyes fixed up on the blue horizon. A great loneliness had
entered into her spirit. Till Count Anteoni had gone she did not realise
how much she had become accustomed to his friendship, how near their
sympathies had been. But directly those tiny, moving specks became one
with the desert she knew that a gap had opened in her life. It might be
small, but it seemed dark and deep. For the first time the desert, which
she had hitherto regarded as a giver, had taken something from her. And
now, as she sat looking at it, while the sun grew stronger and the light
more brilliant, while the mountains gradually assumed a harsher aspect,
and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became,
as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and
terrible aspect of it. That which has the power to bestow has another
power. She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts
of the desert's hands. Would she some day, or in the night when the sky
was like a sapphire, see the procession of those from whom the desert
had taken away perhaps their dreams, perhaps their hopes, perhaps even
all that they passionately loved and had desperately clung to?
And in which of the two processions would she walk?
She got up with a sigh.
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