Yet his death was a shock to her. When he could speak no more, but only
lie still, she remembered suddenly just what he had been before her
mother's flight. The succeeding period, long though it had been and
ugly, was blotted out. She wept for the poor, broken life now ended,
and was afraid for his future in the other world. His departure into the
unknown roused her abruptly to a clear conception of how his action and
her mother's had affected her own character. As she stood by his bed
she wondered what she might have been if her mother had been true, her
father happy, to the end. Then she felt afraid of herself, recognising
partially, and for the first time, how all these years had seen her long
indifference. She felt self-conscious too, ignorant of the real meaning
of life, and as if she had always been, and still remained, rather a
complicated piece of mechanism than a woman. A desolate enervation of
spirit descended upon her, a sort of bitter, and yet dull, perplexity.
She began to wonder what she was, capable of what, of how much good or
evil, and to feel sure that she did not know, had never known or tried
to find out. Once, in this state of mind, she went to confession. She
came away feeling that she had just joined with the priest in a farce.
How can a woman who knows nothing about herself make anything but a
worthless confession? she thought. To say what you have done is not
always to say what you are. And only what you are matters eternally.

Presently, still in this perplexity of spirit, she left England with
only her maid as companion. After a short tour in the south of Europe,
with which she was too familiar, she crossed the sea to Africa, which
she had never seen. Her destination was Beni-Mora. She had chosen it
because she liked its name, because she saw on the map that it was an
oasis in the Sahara Desert, because she knew it was small, quiet, yet
face to face with an immensity of which she had often dreamed. Idly she
fancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far from