As she sat there with her hands folded on her knees, her eyes bent down, and the purple flowers all about her, she felt simplified and cleansed, as if a mass of little things had been swept from her, leaving space for the great thing that henceforth must for ever dwell within her and dominate her life. The burning shame of which she had been conscious on the previous night, when Androvsky told her of his approaching departure and she was stricken as by a lightning flash, had died away from her utterly. She remembered it with wonder. How should she be ashamed of love? She thought that it would be impossible to her to be ashamed, even if Androvsky knew all that she knew. Just then the immense truth of her feeling conquered everything else, made every other thing seem false, and she said to herself that of truth she did not know how to be ashamed. But with the knowledge of the immense truth of her love came the knowledge of the immense sorrow that might, that must, dwell side by side with it. Suddenly she moved. She lifted her eyes from the sand and looked out into the garden. Besides this truth within her there was one other thing in the world that was true. Androvsky was going away. While she sat there the moments were passing. They were making the hours that were bent upon destruction. She was sitting in the garden now and Androvsky was close by. A little time would pass noiselessly. She would be sitting there and Androvsky would be far away, gone from the desert, gone out of her life no doubt for ever. And the garden would not have changed. Each tree would stand in its place, each flower would still give forth its scent. The breeze would go on travelling through the lacework of the branches, the streams slipping between the sandy walls of the rills. The inexorable sun would shine, and the desert would whisper in its blue distances of the unseen things that always dwell beyond. And Androvsky would be gone. Their short intercourse, so full of pain, uneasiness, reserve, so fragmentary, so troubled by abrupt violences, by ignorance, by a sense of horror even on the one side, and by an almost constant suspicion on the other, would have come to an end. She was stunned by the thought, and looked round her as if she expected inanimate Nature to take up arms for her against this fate. Yet she did not for a moment think of taking up arms herself. She had left the hotel without trying to see Androvsky. She did not intend to return to it till he was gone. The idea of seeking him never came into her mind. There is an intensity of feeling that generates action, but there is a greater intensity of feeling that renders action impossible, the feeling that seems to turn a human being into a shell of stone within which burn all the fires of creation. Domini knew that she would not move out of the _fumoir_ till the train was creeping along the river-bed on its way from Beni-Mora.