of her heart. Every trace of her had disappeared save her true self.

That was because she was alone. An extraordinary thing, a dash of the
divine in it, to be actually alone. She was in that perfect innocence,
that purity which is solitude.

I desecrated her solitude with my eyes, but she did not know it, and so
/she/ was not desecrated.

She went over to the window with brightening eyes and swinging hands in
her apron of the colour of the nocturnal sky. Her face and the upper
part of her body were illuminated. She seemed to be in heaven.

She sat down on the sofa, a great low red shadow in the depths of the
room near the window. She leaned her broom beside her. Her dust cloth
fell to the floor and was lost from sight.

She took a letter from her pocket and read it. In the twilight the
letter was the whitest thing in the world. The double sheet trembled
between her fingers, which held it carefully, like a dove in the air.
She put the trembling letter to her lips, and kissed it. From whom was
the letter? Not from her family. A servant girl is not likely to have
so much filial devotion as to kiss a letter from her parents. A lover,
her betrothed, yes. Many, perhaps, knew her lover's name. I did not,
but I witnessed her love as no other person had. And that simple
gesture of kissing the paper, that gesture buried in a room, stripped
bare by the dark, had something sublime and awesome in it.

She rose and went closer to the window, the white letter folded in her
grey hand.