She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship—in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

He had not applauded, he had remained seated, but he had looked at her steadily. From the depths of eternity he had looked at her and Rosalind became immortal. If I could believe him, she thought, if only I could believe him!

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

She gazed, although she knew not why,
Where ocean seemed another sky.
The moon looked down upon the deep,
Till in that deep it seemed to be;
Scarce might the eye the image keep
Of which was sky, and which was sea.

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Wonderful lovely there she sat,
Singing the night away,
All in the solitudinous sea
Of that there lonely bay.

Their eyes met and they stared together at each other, alone in space.

She sat quietly in one corner of the sofa, the end of her sari drawn modestly over her hair. Like the motionless illusion of a madly spinning top, she was staring vacantly into space.

Tears
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at the glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
...Not even the man. Only she
carried the sea inside her body.

Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.

He had come on her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm. That is how she looks when she is alone! had been his first thought; and the second was to note in her the change which his coming produced.

She was thinking of him. Doubled up, small as a child, she gazed intently into the distance, at the man who was not there. She bowed to this image like a suppliant, and felt a divine reflection from it falling upon her — from the offended man, the wounded man, from the master, from him who was everywhere except where they were, who occupied the immense outside, and whose name made them bow their heads, the man to whom they were a prey.