On the following morning, before dawn, Domini awoke, stirred from sleep by her anxiety, persistent even in what seemed unconsciousness, to speed Count Anteoni upon his desert journey. She did not know why he was going, but she felt that some great issue in his life hung upon the accomplishment of the purpose with which he set out, and without affectation she ardently desired that accomplishment. As soon as she awoke she lit a candle and glanced at her watch. She knew by the hour that the dawn was near, and she got up at once and made her toilet. She had told Batouch to be at the hotel door before sunrise to accompany her to the garden, and she wondered if he were below. A stillness as of deep night prevailed in the house, making her movements, while she dressed, seem unnaturally loud. When she put on her hat, and looked into the glass to see if it were just at the right angle, she thought her face, always white, was haggard. This departure made her a little sad. It suggested to her the instability of circumstance, the perpetual change that occurs in life. The going of her kind host made her own going more possible than before, even more likely. Some words from the Bible kept on running through her brain “Here have we no continuing city.” In the silent darkness their cadence held an ineffable melancholy. Her mind heard them as the ear, in a pathetic moment, hears sometimes a distant strain of music wailing like a phantom through the invisible. And the everlasting journeying of all created things oppressed her heart.

When she had buttoned her jacket and drawn on her gloves she went to the French window and pushed back the shutters. A wan semi-darkness looked in upon her. Again she wondered whether Batouch had come. It seemed to her unlikely. She could not imagine that anyone in all the world was up and purposeful but herself. This hour seemed created as a curtain for unconsciousness. Very softly she stepped out upon the verandah and looked over the parapet. She could see the white road, mysteriously white, below. It was deserted. She leaned down.

“Batouch!” she called softly. “Batouch!”

He might be hidden under the arcade, sleeping in his burnous.

“Batouch! Batouch!”

No answer came. She stood by the parapet, waiting and looking down the road.

All the stars had faded, yet there was no suggestion of the sun. She faced an unrelenting austerity. For a moment she thought of this atmosphere, this dense stillness, this gravity of vague and shadowy trees, as the environment of those who had erred, of the lost spirits of men who had died in mortal sin.

Almost she expected to see the desperate shade of her dead father pass between the black stems of the palm trees, vanish into the grey mantle that wrapped the hidden world.

“Batouch! Batouch!”

He was not there. That was certain. She resolved to set out alone and went back into her bedroom to get her revolver. When she came out again with it in her hand Androvsky was standing on the verandah just outside her window. He took off his hat and looked from her face to the revolver. She was startled by his appearance, for she had not heard his step, and had been companioned by a sense of irreparable solitude. This was the first time she had seen him since he vanished from the garden on the previous day.

“You are going out, Madame?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Not alone?”

“I believe so. Unless I find Batouch below.”

She slipped the revolver into the pocket of the loose coat she wore.

“But it is dark.”

“It will be day very soon. Look!”

She pointed towards the east, where a light, delicate and mysterious as the distant lights in the opal, was gently pushing in the sky.

“You ought not to go alone.”

“Unless Batouch is there I must. I have given a promise and I must keep it. There is no danger.”

He hesitated, looking at her with an anxious, almost a suspicious, expression.

“Good-bye, Monsieur Androvsky.”

She went towards the staircase. He followed her quickly to the head of it.

“Don’t trouble to come down with me.”

“If—if Batouch is not there—might not I guard you, Madame?” She remembered the Count’s words and answered:

“Let me tell you where I am going. I am going to say good-bye to Count Anteoni before he starts for his desert journey.”

Androvsky stood there without a word.

“Now, do you care to come if I don’t find Batouch? Mind, I’m not the least afraid.”

“Perhaps he is there—if you told him.” He muttered the words. His whole manner had changed. Now he looked more than suspicious—cloudy and fierce.

“Possibly.”

She began to descend the stairs. He did not follow her, but stood looking after her. When she reached the arcade it was deserted. Batouch had forgotten or had overslept himself. She could have walked on under the roof that was the floor of the verandah, but instead she stepped out into the road. Androvsky was above her by the parapet. She glanced up and said:

“He is not here, but it is of no consequence. Dawn is breaking. Au revoir!”

Slowly he took off his hat. As she went away down the road he was holding it in his hand, looking after her.

“He does not like the Count,” she thought.

At the corner she turned into the street where the sand-diviner had his bazaar, and as she neared his door she was aware of a certain trepidation. She did not want to see those piercing eyes looking at her in the semi-darkness, and she hurried her steps. But her anxiety was needless. All the doors were shut, all the inhabitants doubtless wrapped in sleep. Yet, when she had gained the end of the street, she looked back, half expecting to see an apparition of a thin figure, a tortured face, to hear a voice, like a goblin’s voice, calling after her. Midway down the street there was a man coming slowly behind her. For a moment she thought it was the Diviner in pursuit, but something in the gait soon showed her her mistake. There was a heaviness in the movement of this man quite unlike the lithe and serpentine agility of Aloui. Although she could not see the face, or even distinguish the costume in the morning twilight, she knew it for Androvsky. From a distance he was watching over her. She did not hesitate, but walked on quickly again. She did not wish him to know that she had seen him. When she came to the long road that skirted the desert she met the breeze of dawn that blows out of the east across the flats, and drank in its celestial purity. Between the palms, far away towards Sidi-Zerzour, above the long indigo line of the Sahara, there rose a curve of deep red gold. The sun was coming up to take possession of his waiting world. She longed to ride out to meet him, to give him a passionate welcome in the sand, and the opening words of the Egyptian “Adoration of the Sun by the Perfect Souls” came to her lips:

“Hommage a Toi. Dieu Soleil. Seigneur du Ciel, Roi sur la Terre! Lion du Soir! Grande Ame divine, vivante a toujours.”

Why had she not ordered her horse to ride a little way with Count Anteoni? She might have pretended that she was starting on her great journey.

The red gold curve became a semi-circle of burnished glory resting upon the deep blue, then a full circle that detached itself majestically and mounted calmly up the cloudless sky. A stream of light poured into the oasis, and Domini, who had paused for a moment in silent worship, went on swiftly through the negro village which was all astir, and down the track to the white villa.

She did not glance round again to see whether Androvsky was still following her, for, since the sun had come, she had the confident sensation that he was no longer near.

He had surely given her into the guardianship of the sun.

The door of the garden stood wide open, and, as she entered, she saw three magnificent horses prancing upon the sweep of sand in the midst of a little group of Arabs. Smain greeted her with graceful warmth and begged her to follow him to the fumoir, where the Count was waiting for her.

“It is good of you!” the Count said, meeting her in the doorway. “I relied on you, you see!”

Breakfast for two was scattered upon the little smoking-tables; coffee, eggs, rolls, fruit, sweetmeats. And everywhere sprigs of orange blossom filled the cool air with delicate sweetness.

“How delicious!” she exclaimed. “A breakfast here! But—no, not there!”

“Why not?”

“That is exactly where he was.”

“Aloui! How superstitious you are!”

He moved her table. She sat down near the doorway and poured out coffee for them both.

“You look workmanlike.”

She glanced at his riding-dress and long whip. Smoked glasses hung across his chest by a thin cord.

“I shall have some hard riding, but I’m tough, though you may not think it. I’ve covered many a league of my friend in bygone years.”

He tapped an eggshell smartly, and began to eat with appetite.

“How gravely gay you are!” she said, lifting the steaming coffee to her lips. He smiled.

“Yes. To-day I am happy, as a pious man is happy when after a long illness, he goes once more to church.”

“The desert seems to be everything to you.”

“I feel that I am going out to freedom, to more than freedom.” He stretched out his arms above his head.

“Yet you have stayed always in this garden all these days.”

“I was waiting for my summons, as you will wait for yours.”

“What summons could I have?”

“It will come!” he said with conviction. “It will come!” She was silent, thinking of the diviner’s vision in the sand, of the caravan of camels disappearing in the storm towards the south. Presently she asked him:

“Are you ever coming back?”

He looked at her in surprise, then laughed.

“Of course. What are you thinking?”

“That perhaps you will not come back, that perhaps the desert will keep you.”

“And my garden?”

She looked out across the tiny sand-path and the running rill of water to the great trees stirred by the cool breeze of dawn.

“It would miss you.”

After a moment, during which his bright eyes followed hers, he said:

“Do you know, I have a great belief in the intuitions of good women?”

“Yes?”

“An almost fanatical belief. Will you answer me a question at once, without consideration, without any time for thought?”

“If you ask me to.”

“I do ask you.”

“Then——?”

“Do you see me in this garden any more?”

A voice answered:

“No.”

It was her own, yet it seemed another’s voice, with which she had nothing to do.

A great feeling of sorrow swept over her as she heard it.

“Do come back!” she said.

The Count had got up. The brightness of his eyes was obscured.

“If not here, we shall meet again,” he said slowly.

“Where?”

“In the desert.”

“Did the Diviner—? No, don’t tell me.”

She got up too.

“It is time for you to start?”

“Nearly.”

A sort of constraint had settled over them. She felt it painfully for a moment. Did it proceed from something in his mind or in hers? She could not tell. They walked slowly down one of the little paths and presently found themselves before the room in which sat the purple dog.

“If I am never to come back I must say good-bye to him,” the Count said.

“But you will come back.”

“That voice said ‘No.’”

“It was a lying voice.”

“Perhaps.”

They looked in at the window and met the ferocious eyes of the dog.

“And if I never come back will he bay the moon for his old master?” said the Count with a whimsical, yet sad, smile. “I put him here. And will these trees, many of which I planted, whisper a regret? Absurd, isn’t it, Miss Enfilden? I never can feel that the growing things in my garden do not know me as I know them.”

“Someone will regret you if—”

“Will you? Will you really?”

“Yes.”

“I believe it.”

He looked at her. She could see, by the expression of his eyes, that he was on the point of saying something, but was held back by some fighting sensation, perhaps by some reserve.

“What is it?”

“May I speak frankly to you without offence?” he asked. “I am really rather old, you know.”

“Do speak.”

“That guest of mine yesterday—”

“Monsieur Androvsky?”

“Yes. He interested me enormously, profoundly.”

“Really! Yet he was at his worst yesterday.”

“Perhaps that was why. At any rate, he interested me more than any man I have seen for years. But—” He paused, looking in at the little chamber where the dog kept guard.

“But my interest was complicated by a feeling that I was face to face with a human being who was at odds with life, with himself, even with his Creator—a man who had done what the Arabs never do—defied Allah in Allah’s garden.”

“Oh!”

She uttered a little exclamation of pain. It seemed to her that he was gathering up and was expressing scattered, half formless thoughts of hers.

“You know,” he continued, looking more steadily into the room of the dog, “that in Algeria there is a floating population composed of many mixed elements. I could tell you strange stories of tragedies that have occurred in this land, even here in Beni-Mora, tragedies of violence, of greed, of—tragedies that were not brought about by Arabs.”

He turned suddenly and looked right into her eyes.

“But why am I saying all this?” he suddenly exclaimed. “What is written is written, and such women as you are guarded.”

“Guarded? By whom?”

“By their own souls.”

“I am not afraid,” she said quietly.

“Need you tell me that? Miss Enfilden, I scarcely know why I have said even as little as I have said. For I am, as you know, a fatalist. But certain people, very few, so awaken our regard that they make us forget our own convictions, and might even lead us to try to tamper with the designs of the Almighty. Whatever is to be for you, you will be able to endure. That I know. Why should I, or anyone, seek to know more for you? But still there are moments in which the bravest want a human hand to help them, a human voice to comfort them. In the desert, wherever I may be—and I shall tell you—I am at your service.”

“Thank you,” she said simply.

She gave him her hand. He held it almost as a father or a guardian might have held it.

“And this garden is yours day and night—Smain knows.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

The shrill whinnying of a horse came to them from a distance. Their hands fell apart. Count Anteoni looked round him slowly at the great cocoanut tree, at the shaggy grass of the lawn, at the tall bamboos and the drooping mulberry trees. She saw that he was taking a silent farewell of them.

“This was a waste,” he said at last with a half-stifled sigh. “I turned it into a little Eden and now I am leaving it.”

“For a time.”

“And if it were for ever? Well, the great thing is to let the waste within one be turned into an Eden, if that is possible. And yet how many human beings strive against the great Gardener. At any rate I will not be one of them.”

“And I will not be one.”

“Shall we say good-bye here?”

“No. Let us say it from the wall, and let me see you ride away into the desert.”

She had forgotten for the moment that his route was the road through the oasis. He did not remind her of it. It was easy to ride across the desert and join the route where it came out from the last palms.

“So be it. Will you go to the wall then?”

He touched her hand again and walked away towards the villa, slowly on the pale silver of the sand. When his figure was hidden by the trunks of the trees Domini made her way to the wide parapet. She sat down on one of the tiny seats cut in it, leaned her cheek in her hand and waited. The sun was gathering strength, but the air was still deliciously cool, almost cold, and the desert had not yet put on its aspect of fiery desolation. It looked dreamlike and romantic, not only in its distances, but near at hand. There must surely be dew, she fancied, in the Garden of Allah. She could see no one travelling in it, only some far away camels grazing. In the dawn the desert was the home of the breeze, of gentle sunbeams and of liberty. Presently she heard the noise of horses cantering near at hand, and Count Anteoni, followed by two Arab attendants, came round the bend of the wall and drew up beneath her. He rode on a high red Arab saddle, and a richly-ornamented gun was slung in an embroidered case behind him on the right-hand side. A broad and soft brown hat kept the sun from his forehead. The two attendants rode on a few paces and waited in the shadow of the wall.

“Don’t you wish you were going out?” he said. “Out into that?” And he pointed with his whip towards the dreamlike blue of the far horizon. She leaned over, looking down at him and at his horse, which fidgeted and arched his white neck and dropped foam from his black flexible lips.

“No,” she answered after a moment of thought. “I must speak the truth, you know.”

“To me, always.”

“I feel that you were right, that my summons has not yet come to me.”

“And when it comes?”

“I shall obey it without fear, even if I go in the storm and the darkness.”

He glanced at the radiant sky, at the golden beams slanting down upon the palms.

“The Coran says: ‘The fate of every man have We bound about his neck.’ May yours be as serene, as beautiful, as a string of pearls.”

“But I have never cared to wear pearls,” she answered.

“No? What are your stones?”

“Rubies.”

“Blood! No others?”

“Sapphires.”

“The sky at night.”

“And opals.”

“Fires gleaming across the white of moonlit dunes. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“And you do not ask me for the end of the Diviner’s vision even now?”

“No.”

She hesitated for an instant. Then she added:

“I will tell you why. It seemed to me that there was another’s fate in it as well as my own, and that to hear would be to intrude, perhaps, upon another’s secrets.”

“That was your reason?”

“My only reason.” And then she added, repeating consciously Androvsky’s words: “I think there are things that should be let alone.”

“Perhaps you are right.”

A stronger breath of the cool wind came over the flats, and all the palm trees rustled. Through the garden there was a delicate stir of life.

“My children are murmuring farewell,” said the Count. “I hear them. It is time! Good-bye, Miss Enfilden—my friend, if I may call you so. May Allah have you in his keeping, and when your summons comes, obey it—alone.”

As he said the last word his grating voice dropped to a deep note of earnest, almost solemn, gravity. Then he lifted his hat, touched his horse with his heel, and galloped away into the sun.

Domini watched the three riders till they were only specks on the surface of the desert. Then they became one with it, and were lost in the dreamlike radiance of the morning. But she did not move. She sat with her eyes fixed up on the blue horizon. A great loneliness had entered into her spirit. Till Count Anteoni had gone she did not realise how much she had become accustomed to his friendship, how near their sympathies had been. But directly those tiny, moving specks became one with the desert she knew that a gap had opened in her life. It might be small, but it seemed dark and deep. For the first time the desert, which she had hitherto regarded as a giver, had taken something from her. And now, as she sat looking at it, while the sun grew stronger and the light more brilliant, while the mountains gradually assumed a harsher aspect, and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became, as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and terrible aspect of it. That which has the power to bestow has another power. She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts of the desert’s hands. Would she some day, or in the night when the sky was like a sapphire, see the procession of those from whom the desert had taken away perhaps their dreams, perhaps their hopes, perhaps even all that they passionately loved and had desperately clung to?

And in which of the two processions would she walk?

She got up with a sigh. The garden had become tragic to her for the moment, full of a brooding melancholy. As she turned to leave it she resolved to go to the priest. She had never yet entered his house. Just then she wanted to speak to someone with whom she could be as a little child, to whom she could liberate some part of her spirit simply, certain of a simple, yet not foolish, reception of it by one to whom she could look up. She desired to be not with the friend so much as with the spiritual director. Something was alive within her, something of distress, almost of apprehension, which needed the soothing hand, not of human love, but of religion.

When she reached the priest’s house Beni-Mora was astir with a pleasant bustle of life. The military note pealed through its symphony. Spahis were galloping along the white roads. Tirailleurs went by bearing despatches. Zouaves stood under the palms, staring calmly at the morning, their sunburned hands loosely clasped upon muskets whose butts rested in the sand. But Domini scarcely noticed the brilliant gaiety of the life about her. She was preoccupied, even sad. Yet, as she entered the little garden of the priest, and tapped gently at his door, a sensation of hope sprang up in her heart, born of the sustaining power of her religion.

An Arab boy answered her knock, said that the Father was in and led her at once to a small, plainly-furnished room, with whitewashed walls, and a window opening on to an enclosure at the back, where several large palm trees reared their tufted heads above the smoothly-raked sand. In a moment the priest came in, smiling with pleasure and holding out his hands in welcome.

“Father,” she said at once, “I am come to have a little talk with you. Have you a few moments to give me?”

“Sit down, my child,” he said.

He drew forward a straw chair for her and took one opposite.

“You are not in trouble?”

“I don’t know why I should be, but——”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said:

“I want to tell you a little about my life.”

He looked at her kindly without a word.

His eyes were an invitation for her to speak, and, without further invitation, in as few and simple words as possible, she told him why she had come to Beni-Mora, and something of her parents’ tragedy and its effect upon her.

“I wanted to renew my heart, to find myself,” she said. “My life has been cold, careless. I never lost my faith, but I almost forgot that I had it. I made little use of it. I let it rust.”

“Many do that, but a time comes when they feel that the great weapon with which alone we can fight the sorrows and dangers of the world must be kept bright, or it may fail us in the hour of need.”

“Yes.”

“And this is an hour of need for you. But, indeed, is there ever an hour that is not?”

“I feel to-day, I——”

She stopped, suddenly conscious of the vagueness of her apprehension. It made her position difficult, speech hard for her. She felt that she wanted something, yet scarcely knew what, or exactly why she had come.

“I have been saying good-bye to Count Anteoni,” she resumed. “He has gone on a desert journey.”

“For long?”

“I don’t know, but I feel that it will be.”

“He comes and goes very suddenly. Often he is here and I do not even know it.”

“He is a strange man, but I think he is a good man.”

As she spoke about him she began to realise that something in him had roused the desire in her to come to the priest.

“And he sees far,” she added.

She looked steadily at the priest, who was waiting quietly to hear more. She was glad he did not trouble her mind just then by trying to help her to go on, to be explicit.

“I came here to find peace,” she continued. “And I thought I had found it. I thought so till to-day.”

“We only find peace in one place, and only there by our own will according with God’s.”

“You mean within ourselves.”

“Is it not so?”

“Yes. Then I was foolish to travel in search of it.”

“I would not say that. Place assists the heart, I think, and the way of life. I thought so once.”

“When you wished to be a monk?”

A deep sadness came into his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “And even now I find it very difficult to say, ‘It was not thy will, and so it is not mine.’ But would you care to tell me if anything has occurred recently to trouble you?”

“Something has occurred, Father.”

More excitement came into her face and manner.

“Do you think,” she went on, “that it is right to try to avoid what life seems to be bringing to one, to seek shelter from—from the storm? Don’t monks do that? Please forgive me if—”

“Sincerity will not hurt me,” he interrupted quietly. “If it did I should indeed be unworthy of my calling. Perhaps it is not right for all. Perhaps that is why I am here instead of—”

“Ah, but I remember, you wanted to be one of the freres armes.”

“That was my first hope. But you”—very simply he turned from his troubles to hers—“you are hesitating, are you not, between two courses?”

“I scarcely know. But I want you to tell me. Ought we not always to think of others more than of ourselves?”

“So long as we take care not to put ourselves in too great danger. The soul should be brave, but not foolhardy.”

His voice had changed, had become stronger, even a little stern.

“There are risks that no good Christian ought to run: it is not cowardice, it is wisdom that avoids the Evil One. I have known people who seemed almost to think it was their mission to convert the fallen angels. They confused their powers with the powers that belong to God only.”

“Yes, but—it is so difficult to—if a human being were possessed by the devil, would not you try—would you not go near to that person?”

“If I had prayed, and been told that any power was given me to do what Christ did.”

“To cast out—yes, I know. But sometimes that power is given—even to women.”

“Perhaps especially to them. I think the devil has more fear of a good mother than of many saints.”

Domini realised almost with agony in that moment how her own soul had been stripped of a precious armour. A feeling of bitter helplessness took possession of her, and of contempt for what she now suddenly looked upon as foolish pride. The priest saw that his words had hurt her, yet he did not just then try to pour balm upon the wound.

“You came to me to-day as to a spiritual director, did you not?” he asked.

“Yes, Father.”

“Yet you do not wish to be frank with me. Isn’t that true?”

There was a piercing look in the eyes he fixed upon her.

“Yes,” she answered bravely.

“Why? Cannot you—at least will not you tell me?”

A similar reason to that which had caused her to refuse to hear what the Diviner had seen in the sand caused her now to answer:

“There is something I cannot say. I am sure I am right not to say it.”

“Do you wish me to speak frankly to you, my child?”

“Yes, you may.”

“You have told me enough of your past life to make me feel sure that for some time to come you ought to be very careful in regard to your faith. By the mercy of God you have been preserved from the greatest of all dangers—the danger of losing your belief in the teachings of the only true Church. You have come here to renew your faith which, not killed, has been stricken, reduced, may I not say? to a sort of invalidism. Are you sure you are in a condition yet to help”—he hesitated obviously, then slowly—“others? There are periods in which one cannot do what one may be able to do in the far future. The convalescent who is just tottering in the new attempt to walk is not wise enough to lend an arm to another. To do so may seem nobly unselfish, but is it not folly? And then, my child, we ought to be scrupulously aware what is our real motive for wishing to assist another. Is it of God, or is it of ourselves? Is it a personal desire to increase a perhaps unworthy, a worldly happiness? Egoism is a parent of many children, and often they do not recognise their father.”

Just for a moment Domini felt a heat of anger rise within her. She did not express it, and did not know that she had shown a sign of it till she heard Father Roubier say:

“If you knew how often I have found that what for a moment I believed to be my noblest aspirations had sprung from a tiny, hidden seed of egoism!”

At once her anger died away.

“That is terribly true,” she said. “Of us all, I mean.”

She got up.

“You are going?”

“Yes. I want to think something out. You have made me want to. I must do it. Perhaps I’ll come again.”

“Do. I want to help you if I can.”

There was such a heartfelt sound in his voice that impulsively she held out her hand.

“I know you do. Perhaps you will be able to.”

But even as she said the last words doubt crept into her mind, even into her voice.

The priest came to his gate to see Domini off, and directly she had left him she noticed that Androvsky was under the arcade and had been a witness of their parting. As she went past him and into the hotel she saw that he looked greatly disturbed and excited. His face was lit up by the now fiery glare of the sun, and when, in passing, she nodded to him, and he took off his hat, he cast at her a glance that was like an accusation. As soon as she gained the verandah she heard his heavy step upon the stair. For a moment she hesitated. Should she go into her room and so avoid him, or remain and let him speak to her? She knew that he was following her with that purpose. Her mind was almost instantly made up. She crossed the verandah and sat down in the low chair that was always placed outside her French window. Androvsky followed her and stood beside her. He did not say anything for a moment, nor did she. Then he spoke with a sort of passionate attempt to sound careless and indifferent.

“Monsieur Anteoni has gone, I suppose, Madame?”

“Yes, he has gone. I reached the garden safely, you see.”

“Batouch came later. He was much ashamed when he found you had gone. I believe he is afraid, and is hiding himself till your anger shall have passed away.”

She laughed.

“Batouch could not easily make me angry. I am not like you, Monsieur Androvsky.”

Her sudden challenge startled him, as she had meant it should. He moved quickly, as at an unexpected touch.

“I, Madame?”

“Yes; I think you are very often angry. I think you are angry now.”

His face was flooded with red.

“Why should I be angry?” he stammered, like a man completely taken aback.

“How can I tell? But, as I came in just now, you looked at me as if you wanted to punish me.”

“I—I am afraid—it seems that my face says a great deal that—that—”

“Your lips would not choose to say. Well, it does. Why are you angry with me?” She gazed at him mercilessly, studying the trouble of his face. The combative part of her nature had been roused by the glance he had cast at her. What right had he, had any man, to look at her like that?

Her blunt directness lashed him back into the firmness he had lost. She felt in a moment that there was a fighting capacity in him equal, perhaps superior, to her own.

“When I saw you come from the priest’s house, Madame, I felt as if you had been there speaking about me—about my conduct of yesterday.”

“Indeed! Why should I do that?”

“I thought as you had kindly wished me to come—”

He stopped.

“Well?” she said, in rather a hard voice.

“Madame, I don’t know what I thought, what I think—only I cannot bear that you should apologise for any conduct of mine. Indeed, I cannot bear it.”

He looked fearfully excited and moved two or three steps away, then returned.

“Were you doing that?” he asked. “Were you, Madame?”

“I never mentioned your name to Father Roubier, nor did he to me,” she answered.

For a moment he looked relieved, then a sudden suspicion seemed to strike him.

“But without mentioning my name?” he said.

“You wish to accuse me of quibbling, of insincerity, then!” she exclaimed with a heat almost equal to his own.

“No, Madame, no! Madame, I—I have suffered much. I am suspicious of everybody. Forgive me, forgive me!”

He spoke almost with distraction. In his manner there was something desperate.

“I am sure you have suffered,” she said more gently, yet with a certain inflexibility at which she herself wondered, yet which she could not control. “You will always suffer if you cannot govern yourself. You will make people dislike you, be suspicious of you.”

“Suspicious! Who is suspicious of me?” he asked sharply. “Who has any right to be suspicious of me?”

She looked up and fancied that, for an instant, she saw something as ugly as terror in his eyes.

“Surely you know that people don’t ask permission to be suspicious of their fellow-men?” she said.

“No one here has any right to consider me or my actions,” he said, fierceness blazing out of him. “I am a free man, and can do as I will. No one has any right—no one!”

Domini felt as if the words were meant for her, as if he had struck her. She was so angry that she did not trust herself to speak, and instinctively she put her hand up to her breast, as a woman might who had received a blow. She touched something small and hard that was hidden beneath her gown. It was the little wooden crucifix Androvsky had thrown into the stream at Sidi-Zerzour. As she realised that her anger died. She was humbled and ashamed. What was her religion if, at a word, she could be stirred to such a feeling of passion?

“I, at least, am not suspicious of you,” she said, choosing the very words that were most difficult for her to say just then. “And Father Roubier—if you included him—is too fine-hearted to cherish unworthy suspicions of anyone.”

She got up. Her voice was full of a subdued, but strong, emotion.

“Oh, Monsieur Androvsky!” she said. “Do go over and see him. Make friends with him. Never mind yesterday. I want you to be friends with him, with everyone here. Let us make Beni-Mora a place of peace and good will.”

Then she went across the verandah quickly to her room, and passed in, closing the window behind her.

Dejeuner was brought into her sitting-room. She ate it in solitude, and late in the afternoon she went out on the verandah. She had made up her mind to spend an hour in the church. She had told Father Roubier that she wanted to think something out. Since she had left him the burden upon her mind had become heavier, and she longed to be alone in the twilight near the altar. Perhaps she might be able to cast down the burden there. In the verandah she stood for a moment and thought how wonderful was the difference between dawn and sunset in this land. The gardens, that had looked like a place of departed and unhappy spirits when she rose that day, were now bathed in the luminous rays of the declining sun, were alive with the softly-calling voices of children, quivered with romance, with a dreamlike, golden charm. The stillness of the evening was intense, enclosing the children’s voices, which presently died away; but while she was marvelling at it she was disturbed by a sharp noise of knocking. She looked in the direction from which it came and saw Androvsky standing before the priest’s door. As she looked, the door was opened by the Arab boy and Androvsky went in.

Then she did not think of the gardens any more. With a radiant expression in her eyes she went down and crossed over to the church. It was empty. She went softly to a prie-dieu near the altar, knelt down and covered her eyes with her hands.

At first she did not pray, or even think consciously, but just rested in the attitude which always seems to bring humanity nearest its God. And, almost immediately, she began to feel a quietude of spirit, as if something delicate descended upon her, and lay lightly about her, shrouding her from the troubles of the world. How sweet it was to have the faith that brings with it such tender protection, to have the trust that keeps alive through the swift passage of the years the spirit of the little child. How sweet it was to be able to rest. There was at this moment a sensation of deep joy within her. It grew in the silence of the church, and, as it grew, brought with it presently a growing consciousness of the lives beyond those walls, of other spirits capable of suffering, of conflict, and of peace, not far away; till she knew that this present blessing of happiness came to her, not only from the scarce-realised thought of God, but also from the scarce-realised thought of man.

Close by, divided from her only by a little masonry, a few feet of sand, a few palm trees, Androvsky was with the priest.

Still kneeling, with her face between her hands, Domini began to think and pray. The memory of her petition to Notre Dame de la Garde came back to her. Before she knew Africa she had prayed for men wandering, and perhaps unhappy, there, for men whom she would probably never see again, would never know. And now that she was growing familiar with this land, divined something of its wonders and its dangers, she prayed for a man in it whom she did not know, who was very near to her making a sacrifice of his prejudices, perhaps of his fears, at her desire. She prayed for Androvsky without words, making of her feelings of gratitude to him a prayer, and presently, in the darkness framed by her hands, she seemed to see Liberty once more, as in the shadows of the dancing-house, standing beside a man who prayed far out in the glory of the desert. The storm, spoken of by the Diviner, did not always rage. It was stilled to hear his prayer. And the darkness had fled, and the light drew near to listen. She pressed her face more strongly against her hands, and began to think more definitely.

Was this interview with the priest the first step taken by Androvsky towards the gift the desert held for him?

He must surely be a man who hated religion, or thought he hated it.

Perhaps he looked upon it as a chain, instead of as the hammer that strikes away the fetters from the slave.

Yet he had worn a crucifix.

She lifted her head, put her hand into her breast, and drew out the crucifix. What was its history? She wondered as she looked at it. Had someone who loved him given it to him, someone, perhaps, who grieved at his hatred of holiness, and who fancied that this very humble symbol might one day, as the humble symbols sometimes do, prove itself a little guide towards shining truth? Had a woman given it to him?

She laid the cross down on the edge of the prie-dieu.

There was red fire gleaming now on the windows of the church. She realised the pageant that was marching up the west, the passion of the world as well as the purity which lay beyond the world. Her mind was disturbed. She glanced from the red radiance on the glass to the dull brown wood of the cross. Blood and agony had made it the mystical symbol that it was—blood and agony.

She had something to think out. That burden was still upon her mind, and now again she felt its weight, a weight that her interview with the priest had not lifted. For she had not been able to be quite frank with the priest. Something had held her back from absolute sincerity, and so he had not spoken quite plainly all that was in his mind. His words had been a little vague, yet she had understood the meaning that lay behind them.

Really, he had warned her against Androvsky. There were two men of very different types. One was unworldly as a child. The other knew the world. Neither of them had any acquaintance with Androvsky’s history, and both had warned her. It was instinct then that had spoken in them, telling them that he was a man to be shunned, perhaps feared. And her own instinct? What had it said? What did it say?

For a long time she remained in the church. But she could not think clearly, reason calmly, or even pray passionately. For a vagueness had come into her mind like the vagueness of twilight that filled the space beneath the starry roof, softening the crudeness of the ornaments, the garish colours of the plaster saints. It seemed to her that her thoughts and feelings lost their outlines, that she watched them fading like the shrouded forms of Arabs fading in the tunnels of Mimosa. But as they vanished surely they whispered, “That which is written is written.”

The mosques of Islam echoed these words, and surely this little church that bravely stood among them.

“That which is written is written.”

Domini rose from her knees, hid the wooden cross once more in her breast, and went out into the evening.

As she left the church door something occurred which struck the vagueness from her. She came upon Androvsky and the priest. They were standing together at the latter’s gate, which he was in the act of opening to an accompaniment of joyous barking from Bous-Bous. Both men looked strongly expressive, as if both had been making an effort of some kind. She stopped in the twilight to speak to them.

“Monsieur Androvsky has kindly been paying me a visit,” said Father Roubier.

“I am glad,” Domini said. “We ought all to be friends here.”

There was a perceptible pause. Then Androvsky lifted his hat.

“Good-evening, Madame,” he said. “Good-evening, Father.” And he walked away quickly.

The priest looked after him and sighed profoundly.

“Oh, Madame!” he exclaimed, as if impelled to liberate his mind to someone, “what is the matter with that man? What is the matter?”

He stared fixedly into the twilight after Androvsky’s retreating form.

“With Monsieur Androvsky?”

She spoke quietly, but her mind was full of apprehension, and she looked searchingly at the priest.

“Yes. What can it be?”

“But—I don’t understand.”

“Why did he come to see me?”

“I asked him to come.”

She blurted out the words without knowing why, only feeling that she must speak the truth.

“You asked him!”

“Yes. I wanted you to be friends—and I thought perhaps you might——”

“Yes?”

“I wanted you to be friends.” She repeated it almost stubbornly.

“I have never before felt so ill at ease with any human being,” exclaimed the priest with tense excitement. “And yet I could not let him go. Whenever he was about to leave me I was impelled to press him to remain. We spoke of the most ordinary things, and all the time it was as if we were in a great tragedy. What is he? What can he be?” (He still looked down the road.)

“I don’t know. I know nothing. He is a man travelling, as other men travel.”

“Oh, no!”

“What do you mean, Father?”

“I mean that other travellers are not like this man.”

He leaned his thin hands heavily on the gate, and she saw, by the expression of his eyes, that he was going to say something startling.

“Madame,” he said, lowering his voice, “I did not speak quite frankly to you this afternoon. You may, or you may not, have understood what I meant. But now I will speak plainly. As a priest I warn you, I warn you most solemnly, not to make friends with this man.”

There was a silence, then Domini said:

“Please give me your reason for this warning.”

“That I can’t do.”

“Because you have no reason, or because it is not one you care to tell me?”

“I have no reason to give. My reason is my instinct. I know nothing of this man—I pity him. I shall pray for him. He needs prayers, yes, he needs them. But you are a woman out here alone. You have spoken to me of yourself, and I feel it my duty to say that I advise you most earnestly to break off your acquaintance with Monsieur Androvsky.”

“Do you mean that you think him evil?”

“I don’t know whether he is evil, I don’t know what he is.”

“I know he is not evil.”

The priest looked at her, wondering.

“You know—how?”

“My instinct,” she said, coming a step nearer, and putting her hand, too, on the gate near his. “Why should we desert him?”

“Desert him, Madame!”

Father Roubier’s voice sounded amazed.

“Yes. You say he needs prayers. I know it. Father, are not the first prayers, the truest, those that go most swiftly to Heaven—acts?”

The priest did not reply for a moment. He looked at her and seemed to be thinking deeply.

“Why did you send Monsieur Androvsky to me this afternoon?” he said at last abruptly.

“I knew you were a good man, and I fancied if you became friends you might help him.”

His face softened.

“A good man,” he said. “Ah!” He shook his head sadly, with a sound that was like a little pathetic laugh. “I—a good man! And I allow an almost invincible personal feeling to conquer my inward sense of right! Madame, come into the garden for a moment.”

He opened the gate, she passed in, and he led her round the house to the enclosure at the back, where they could talk in greater privacy. Then he continued:

“You are right, Madame. I am here to try to do God’s work, and sometimes it is better to act for a human being, perhaps, even than to pray for him. I will tell you that I feel an almost invincible repugnance to Monsieur Androvsky, a repugnance that is almost stronger than my will to hold it in check.” He shivered slightly. “But, with God’s help, I’ll conquer that. If he stays on here I’ll try to be his friend. I’ll do all I can. If he is unhappy, far away from good, perhaps—I say it humbly, Madame, I assure you—I might help him. But”—and here his face and manner changed, became firmer, more dominating—“you are not a priest, and—”

“No, only a woman,” she said, interrupting him.

Something in her voice arrested him. There was a long silence in which they paced slowly up and down on the sand between the palm trees. The twilight was dying into night. Already the tomtoms were throbbing in the street of the dancers, and the shriek of the distant pipes was faintly heard. At last the priest spoke again.

“Madame,” he said, “when you came to me this afternoon there was something that you could not tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Had it anything to do with Monsieur Androvsky?”

“I meant to ask you to advise me about myself.”

“My advice to you was and is—be strong but not too foolhardy.”

“Believe me I will try not to be foolhardy. But you said something else too, something about women. Don’t you remember?”

She stopped, took his hands impulsively and pressed them.

“Father, I’ve scarcely ever been of any use all my life. I’ve scarcely ever tried to be. Nothing within me said, ‘You could be,’ and if it had I was so dulled by routine and sorrow that I don’t think I should have heard it. But here it is different. I am not dulled. I can hear. And—suppose I can be of use for the first time! You wouldn’t say to me, ‘Don’t try!’ You couldn’t say that?”

He stood holding her hands and looking into her face for a moment. Then he said, half-humorously, half-sadly:

“My child, perhaps you know your own strength best. Perhaps your safest spiritual director is your own heart. Who knows? But whether it be so or not you will not take advice from me.”

She knew that was true now and, for a moment, felt almost ashamed.

“Forgive me,” she said. “But—it is strange, and may seem to you ridiculous or even wrong—ever since I have been here I have felt as if everything that happened had been arranged beforehand, as if it had to happen. And I feel that, too, about the future.”

“Count Anteoni’s fatalism!” the priest said with a touch of impatient irritation. “I know. It is the guiding spirit of this land. And you too are going to be led by it. Take care! You have come to a land of fire, and I think you are made of fire.”

For a moment she saw a fanatical expression in his eyes. She thought of it as the look of the monk crushed down within his soul. He opened his lips again, as if to pour forth upon her a torrent of burning words. But the look died away, and they parted quietly like two good friends. Yet, as she went to the hotel, she knew that Father Roubier could not give her the kind of help she wanted, and she even fancied that perhaps no priest could. Her heart was in a turmoil, and she seemed to be in the midst of a crowd.

Batouch was at the door, looking elaborately contrite and ready with his lie. He had been seized with fever in the night, in token whereof he held up hands which began to shake like wind-swept leaves. Only now had he been able to drag himself from his quilt and, still afflicted as he was, to creep to his honoured patron and crave her pardon. Domini gave it with an abstracted carelessness that evidently hurt his pride, and was passing into the hotel when he said:

“Irena is going to marry Hadj, Madame.”

Since the fracas at the dancing-house both the dancer and her victim had been under lock and key.

“To marry her after she tried to kill him!” said Domini.

“Yes, Madame. He loves her as the palm tree loves the sun. He will take her to his room, and she will wear a veil, and work for him and never go out any more.”

“What! She will live like the Arab women?”

“Of course, Madame. But there is a very nice terrace on the roof outside Hadj’s room, and Hadj will permit her to take the air there, in the evening or when it is hot.”

“She must love Hadj very much.”

“She does, or why should she try to kill him?”

So that was an African love—a knife-thrust and a taking of the veil! The thought of it added a further complication to the disorder that was in her mind.

“I will see you after dinner, Batouch,” she said.

She felt that she must do something, go somewhere that night. She could not remain quiet.

Batouch drew himself up and threw out his broad chest. His air gave place to importance, and, as he leaned against the white pillar of the arcade, folded his ample burnous round him, and glanced up at the sky he saw, in fancy, a five-franc piece glittering in the chariot of the moon.

The priest did not come to dinner that night, but Androvsky was already at his table when Domini came into the salle-a-manger. He got up from his seat and bowed formally, but did not speak. Remembering his outburst of the morning she realised the suspicion which her second interview with the priest had probably created in his mind, and now she was not free from a feeling of discomfort that almost resembled guilt. For now she had been led to discuss Androvsky with Father Roubier, and had it not been almost an apology when she said, “I know he is not evil”? Once or twice during dinner, when her eyes met Androvsky’s for a moment, she imagined that he must know why she had been at the priest’s house, that anger was steadily increasing in him.

He was a man who hated to be observed, to be criticised. His sensitiveness was altogether abnormal, and made her wonder afresh where his previous life had been passed. It must surely have been a very sheltered existence. Contact with the world blunts the fine edge of our feeling with regard to others’ opinion of us. In the world men learn to be heedless of the everlasting buzz of comment that attends their goings out and their comings in. But Androvsky was like a youth, alive to the tiniest whisper, set on fire by a glance. To such a nature life in the world must be perpetual torture. She thought of him with a sorrow that—strangely in her—was not tinged with contempt. That which manifested by another man would certainly have moved her to impatience, if not to wrath, in this man woke other sensations—curiosity, pity, terror.

Yes—terror. To-night she knew that. The long day, begun in the semidarkness before the dawn and ending in the semidarkness of the twilight, had, with its events that would have seemed to another ordinary and trivial enough, carried her forward a stage on an emotional pilgrimage. The half-veiled warnings of Count Anteoni and of the priest, followed by the latter’s almost passionately abrupt plain speaking, had not been without effect. To-night something of Europe and her life there, with its civilised experience and drastic training in the management of woman’s relations with humanity in general, crept back under the palm trees and the brilliant stars of Africa; and despite the fatalism condemned by Father Roubier, she was more conscious than she had hitherto been of how others—the outside world—would be likely to regard her acquaintance with Androvsky. She stood, as it were, and looked on at the events in which she herself had been and was involved, and in that moment she was first aware of a thrill of something akin to terror, as if, perhaps, without knowing it, she had been moving amid a great darkness, as if perhaps a great darkness were approaching. Suddenly she saw Androvsky as some strange and ghastly figure of legend; as the wandering Jew met by a traveller at cross roads and distinguished for an instant in an oblique lightning flash; as Vanderdecken passing in the hurricane and throwing a blood-red illumination from the sails of his haunted ship; as the everlasting climber of the Brocken, as the shrouded Arab of the Eastern legend, who announced coming disaster to the wanderers in the desert by beating a death-roll on a drum among the dunes.

And with Count Anteoni and the priest she set another figure, that of the sand-diviner, whose tortured face had suggested a man looking on a fate that was terrible. Had not he, too, warned her? Had not the warning been threefold, been given to her by the world, the Church, and the under-world—the world beneath the veil?

She met Androvsky’s eyes. He was getting up to leave the room. His movement caught her away from things visionary, but not from worldly things. She still looked on herself moving amid these events at which her world would laugh or wonder, and perhaps for the first time in her life she was uneasily self-conscious because of the self that watched herself, as if that self held something coldly satirical that mocked at her and marvelled.