What passed between them now were difficult to relate. Afterwards they themselves had but a confused idea. It was very certain that Ahalya loved him; for she delivered herself up entirely to his will. Yet, with each of them, passion was mingled with something better: a deep tenderness, a high companionship, the mutual compassion of the unhappy. She laid upon him a great responsibility, telling him over and over again that without him she should not try to live; explaining the torture of her self-hatred: the shame that, loving him, she must still submit to another; wetting his eyes with her tears while she demanded from him a solution of her miserable problem. Pitying while he loved, Fidá read what her warped life had been, and all the history of her loneliness. Nor did he fail her in a certain sort of comfort, of a philosophical nature, for which she cared little, save that it came from his lips. But she listened eagerly to all that he told her of himself, of his country and his life; though he withheld the story of the curse, of which, at their first meeting, he had given her a suggestion that she seemed to have forgotten. They talked long, but the talk was finally hushed. Fidá extinguished the single lamp that burned. And later, Neila, come to warn them of the time, found them there in the darkness, Ahalya weeping in his arms. This time it was the woman that bade her lover leave her; for Fidá had not the strength to put her from him. When at last he reached the anteroom, only three or four minutes before the appearance of Churi’s relief, the latter’s heart was in his throat, and he was ready to declare that he would never again run the risk of disaster and discovery through the slave’s rashness. Later in the night he sought Fidá in his own room, and the two had a long talk together. The eunuch had come with the purpose of protesting against the present arrangement, with which he was in a high state of dissatisfaction. But he ended by allowing himself to be, to some extent, overpowered by the earnestness and the logic of love; though after he had departed, Fidá lay awake for a long time, anxiously considering the risks that he ran in placing all his dependence on this one person, whom he knew very well to be in some ways entirely unreliable.