She seldom left it for the outside world, except when she went to deliver the work she had finished, and on Sundays when she spent the morning wandering from one church to another. As a consequence of these brief but regular pilgrimages her beautiful face became familiar to the residents of some of the side streets where the women and children made her low courtesies and the men doffed their hats by that divine instinct of reverence which we all feel in the presence of the beautiful and the good.
A double craving devours our human hearts--for solitude and for companionship. As there are hours when we thirst to be alone, there are others when we hunger for the touch of a human hand, the glance of a human eye, a smile from human lips. Even gross, material things like food and drink lose half their flavor when taken in solitude. Pepeeta needed friends and found them.
We never know how small a part of ourselves that fraction may be which we have taken for the whole! We come to know ourselves by struggle and endeavor, more than by thought and meditation. We have only to do our work each day in hope and trust. We can only find rest in effort. It is not in repose, but in activity--not in joy, but in sorrow, that the soul comes to its second birth. Pepeeta needed labor and suffering, and they were sent her.
She accepted all that followed her supreme decision without a question and without a murmur for many months, and then--a reaction came! The draughts upon her physical and emotional nature had been too great.
"Attempt the end, and never stand to doubt, Nothing's so hard but search will find it out."
During several months of loneliness and sorrow a great change had been taking place in the mind of the patient sufferer, of which she was only vaguely conscious.
Purposes are often formed in the depths of our souls, of which we know nothing until they suddenly emerge into full view. Such a purpose had been slowly evolving in the heart of Pepeeta.
The strain which she had been undergoing began at last to exhaust her physically.
Her vital force became depleted, her step grew feeble, the light died out of her eyes, she drooped and crept feebly about her room. The determination which she had so resolutely maintained to live apart from her guilty lover slowly ebbed away. She was, after all, a woman, not a disembodied spirit, and her woman's heart yearned unquenchably for the touch of her lover's hand, for the kisses of his lips, for the comfort of his presence.