Alone in the now empty salle-a-manger Domini asked herself the question. She was restless, terribly restless in mind, and wanted distraction. The idea of going to her room, of reading, even of sitting quietly in the verandah, was intolerable to her. She longed for action, swiftness, excitement, the help of outside things, of that exterior life which she had told Count Anteoni she had begun to see as a mirage. Had she been in a city she would have gone to a theatre to witness some tremendous drama, or to hear some passionate or terrible opera. Beni-Mora might have been a place of many and strange tragedies, would be no doubt again, but it offered at this moment little to satisfy her mood. The dances of the Cafes Maures, the songs of the smokers of the keef, the long histories of the story-tellers between the lighted candles—she wanted none of these, and, for a moment, she wished she were in London, Paris, any great capital that spent itself to suit the changing moods of men. With a sigh she got up and went out to the Arcade. Batouch joined her immediately.

“What can I do to-night, Batouch?” she said.

“There are the femmes mauresques,” he began.

“No, no.”

“Would Madame like to hear the story-teller?”

“No. I should not understand him.”

“I can explain to Madame.”

“No.”

She stepped out into the road.

“There will be a moon to-night, won’t there?” she said, looking up at the starry sky.

“Yes, Madame, later.”

“What time will it rise?”

“Between nine and ten.”

She stood in the road, thinking. It had occurred to her that she had never seen moonrise in the desert.

“And now it is”—she looked at her watch—“only eight.”

“Does Madame wish to see the moon come up pouring upon the palms—”

“Don’t talk so much, Batouch,” she said brusquely.

To-night the easy and luscious imaginings of the poet worried her like the cry of a mosquito. His presence even disturbed her. Yet what could she do without him? After a pause she said:

“Can one go into the desert at night?”

“On foot, Madame? It would be dangerous. One cannot tell what may be in the desert by night.”

These words made her long to go. They had a charm, a violence perhaps, of the unknown.

“One might ride,” she said. “Why not? Who could hurt us if we were mounted and armed?”

“Madame is brave as the panther in the forests of the Djurdjurah.”

“And you, Batouch? Aren’t you brave?”

“Madame, I am afraid of nothing.” He did not say it boastfully, like Hadj, but calmly, almost loftily.

“Well, we are neither of us afraid. Let us ride out on the Tombouctou road and see the moon rise. I’ll go and put on my habit.”

“Madame should take her revolver.”

“Of course. Bring the horses round at nine.”

When she had put on her habit it was only a few minutes after eight. She longed to be in the saddle, going at full speed up the long, white road between the palms. Physical movement was necessary to her, and she began to pace up and down the verandah quickly. She wished she had ordered the horses at once, or that she could do something definite to fill up the time till they came. As she turned at the end of the verandah she saw a white form approaching her; when it drew near she recognised Hadj, looking self-conscious and mischievous, but a little triumphant too. At this moment she was glad to see him. He received her congratulations on his recovery and approaching marriage with a sort of skittish gaiety, but she soon discovered that he had come with a money-making reason. Having seen his cousin safely off the premises, it had evidently occurred to him to turn an honest penny. And pennies were now specially needful to him in view of married life.

“Does Madame wish to see something strange and wonderful to-night?” he asked, after a moment, looking at her sideways out of the corners of his wicked eyes, which, as Domini could see, were swift to read character and mood.

“I am going out riding.”

He looked astonished.

“In the night?”

“Yes. Batouch has gone to fetch the horses.”

Hadj’s face became a mask of sulkiness.

“If Madame goes out with Batouch she will be killed. There are robbers in the desert, and Batouch is afraid of—”

“Could we see the strange and wonderful thing in an hour?” she interrupted.

The gay and skittish expression returned instantly to his face.

“Yes, Madame.”

“What is it?”

He shook his head and made an artful gesture with his hand in the air.

“Madame shall see.”

His long eyes were full of mystery, and he moved towards the staircase.

“Come, Madame.”

Domini laughed and followed him. She felt as if she were playing a game, yet her curiosity was roused. They went softly down and slipped out of the hotel like children fearing to be caught.

“Batouch will be angry. There will be white foam on his lips,” whispered Hadj, dropping his chin and chuckling low in his throat. “This way, Madame.”

He led her quickly across the gardens to the Rue Berthe, and down a number of small streets, till they reached a white house before which, on a hump, three palm trees grew from one trunk. Beyond was waste ground, and further away a stretch of sand and low dunes lost in the darkness of the, as yet, moonless night. Domini looked at the house and at Hadj, and wondered if it would be foolish to enter.

“What is it?” she asked again.

But he only replied, “Madame will see!” and struck his flat hand upon the door. It was opened a little way, and a broad face covered with little humps and dents showed, the thick lips parted and muttering quickly. Then the face was withdrawn, the door opened wider, and Hadj beckoned to Domini to go in. After a moment’s hesitation she did so, and found herself in a small interior court, with a tiled floor, pillars, and high up a gallery of carved wood, from which, doubtless, dwelling-rooms opened. In the court, upon cushions, were seated four vacant-looking men, with bare arms and legs and long matted hair, before a brazier, from which rose a sharply pungent perfume. Two of these men were very young, with pale, ascetic faces and weary eyes. They looked like young priests of the Sahara. At a short distance, upon a red pillow, sat a tiny boy of about three years old, dressed in yellow and green. When Domini and Hadj came into the court no one looked at them except the child, who stared with slowly-rolling, solemn eyes, slightly shifting on the pillow. Hadj beckoned to Domini to seat herself upon some rugs between the pillars, sat down beside her and began to make a cigarette. Complete silence prevailed. The four men stared at the brazier, holding their nostrils over the incense fumes which rose from it in airy spirals. The child continued to stare at Domini. Hadj lit his cigarette. And time rolled on.

Domini had desired violence, and had been conveyed into a dumbness of mystery, that fell upon her turmoil of spirit like a blow. What struck her as especially strange and unnatural was the fact that the men with whom she was sitting in the dim court of this lonely house had not looked at her, did not appear to know that she was there. Hadj had caught the aroma of their meditations with the perfume of the incense, for his eyes had lost their mischief and become gloomily profound, as if they stared on bygone centuries or watched a far-off future. Even the child began to look elderly, and worn as with fastings and with watchings. As the fumes perpetually ascended from the red-hot coals of the brazier the sharp smell of the perfume grew stronger. There was in it something provocative and exciting that was like a sound, and Domini marvelled that the four men who crouched over it and drank it in perpetually could be unaffected by its influence when she, who was at some distance from it, felt dawning on her desires of movement, of action, almost a physical necessity to get up and do something extraordinary, absurd or passionate, such as she had never done or dreamed of till this moment.

A low growl like that of a wild beast broke the silence. Domini did not know at first whence it came. She stared at the four men, but they were all gazing vacantly into the brazier, their naked arms dropping to the floor. She glanced at Hadj. He was delicately taking a cigarette paper from a little case. The child—no, it was absurd even to think of a child emitting such a sound.

Someone growled again more fiercely, and this time Domini saw that it was the palest of the ascetic-looking youths. He shook back his long hair, rose to his feet with a bound, and moving into the centre of the court gazed ferociously at his companions. As if in obedience to the glance, two of them stretched their arms backwards, found two tomtoms, and began to beat them loudly and monotonously. The young ascetic bowed to the tomtoms, dropping his lower jaw and jumping on his bare feet. He bowed again as if saluting a fetish, and again and again. Ceaselessly he bowed to the tomtoms, always jumping softly from the pavement. His long hair fell over his face and back upon his shoulders with a monotonous regularity that imitated the tomtoms, as if he strove to mould his life in accord with the fetish to which he offered adoration. Flecks of foam appeared upon his lips, and the asceticism in his eyes changed to a bestial glare. His whole body was involved in a long and snake-like undulation, above which his hair flew to and fro. Presently the second youth, moving reverently like a priest about the altar, stole to a corner and returned with a large and curved sheet of glass. Without looking at Domini he came to her and placed it in her hands. When the dancer saw the glass he stood still, growled again long and furiously, threw himself on his knees before Domini, licked his lips, then, abruptly thrusting forward his face, set his teeth in the sheet of glass, bit a large piece off, crunched it up with a loud noise, swallowed it with a gulp, and growled for more. She fed him again, while the tomtoms went on roaring, and the child in its red pillow watched with its weary eyes. And when he was full fed, only a fragment of glass remained between her fingers, he fell upon the ground and lay like one in a trance.

Then the second youth bowed to the tomtoms, leaping gently on the pavement, foamed at the mouth, growled, snuffed up the incense fumes, shook his long mane, and placed his naked feet in the red-hot coals of the brazier. He plucked out a coal and rolled his tongue round it. He placed red coals under his bare armpits and kept them there, pressing his arms against his sides. He held a coal, like a monocle, in his eye socket against his eye. And all the time he leaped and bowed and foamed, undulating his body like a snake. The child looked on with a still gravity, and the tomtoms never ceased. From the gallery above painted faces peered down, but Domini did not see them. Her attention was taken captive by the young priests of the Sahara. For so she called them in her mind, realising that there were religious fanatics whose half-crazy devotion seemed to lift them above the ordinary dangers to the body. One of the musicians now took his turn, throwing his tomtom to the eater of glass, who had wakened from his trance. He bowed and leaped; thrust spikes behind his eyes, through his cheeks, his lips, his arms; drove a long nail into his head with a wooden hammer; stood upon the sharp edge of an upturned sword blade. With the spikes protruding from his face in all directions, and his eyes bulging out from them like balls, he spun in a maze of hair, barking like a dog. The child regarded him with a still attention, and the incense fumes were cloudy in the court. Then the last of the four men sprang up in the midst of a more passionate uproar from the tomtoms. He wore a filthy burnous, and, with a shriek, he plunged his hand into its hood and threw some squirming things upon the floor. They began to run, rearing stiff tails into the air. He sank down, blew upon them, caught them, letting them set their tail weapons in his fingers, and lifting them thus, imbedded, high above the floor. Then again he put them down, breathed upon each one, drew a circle round each with his forefinger. His face had suddenly become intense, hypnotic. The scorpions, as if mesmerised, remained utterly still, each in its place within its imaginary circle, that had become a cage; and their master bowed to the fetish of the tomtoms, leaped, grinned, and bowed again, undulating his body in a maze of hair.

Domini felt as if she, like the scorpions, had been mesmerised. She, too, was surely bound in a circle, breathed upon by some arrogant breath of fanaticism, commanded by some horrid power. She looked at the scorpions and felt a sort of pity for them. From time to time the bowing fanatic glanced at them through his hair out of the corners of his eyes, licked his lips, shook his shoulders, and uttered a long howl, thrilling with the note of greed. The tomtoms pulsed faster and faster, louder and louder, and all the men began to sing a fierce chant, the song surely of desert souls driven crazy by religion. One of the scorpions moved slightly, reared its tail, began to run. Instantly, as if at a signal, the dancer fell upon his knees, bent down his head, seized it in his teeth, munched it and swallowed it. At the same moment with the uproar of the tomtoms there mingled a loud knocking on the door.

Hadj’s lips curled back from his pointed teeth and he looked dangerous.

“It is Batouch!” he snarled.

Domini got up. Without a word, turning her back upon the court, she made her way out, still hearing the howl of the scorpion-eater, the roar of the tomtoms, and the knocking on the door. Hadj followed her quickly, protesting. At the door was the man with the pitted white face and the thick lips. When he saw her he held out his hand. She gave him some money, he opened the door, and she came out into the night by the triple palm tree. Batouch stood there looking furious, with the bridles of two horses across his arm. He began to speak in Arabic to Hadj, but she stopped him with an imperious gesture, gave Hadj his fee, and in a moment was in the saddle and cantering away into the dark. She heard the gallop of Batouch’s horse coming up behind her and turned her head.

“Batouch,” she said, “you are the smartest”—she used the word chic—“Arab here. Do you know what is the fashion in London when a lady rides out with the attendant who guards her—the really smart thing to do?”

She was playing on his vanity. He responded with a ready smile.

“No, Madame.”

“The attendant rides at a short distance behind her, so that no one can come up near her without his knowledge.”

Batouch fell back, and Domini cantered on, congratulating herself on the success of her expedient.

She passed through the village, full of strolling white figures, lights and the sound of music, and was soon at the end of the long, straight road that was significant to her as no other road had ever been. Each time she saw it, stretching on till it was lost in the serried masses of the palms, her imagination was stirred by a longing to wander through barbaric lands, by a nomad feeling that was almost irresistible. This road was a track of fate to her. When she was on it she had a strange sensation as if she changed, developed, drew near to some ideal. It influenced her as one person may influence another. Now for the first time she was on it in the night, riding on the crowded shadows of its palms. She drew rein and went more slowly. She had a desire to be noiseless.

In the obscurity the thickets of the palms looked more exotic than in the light of day. There was no motion in them. Each tree stood like a delicately carven thing, silhouetted against the remote purple of the void. In the profound firmament the stars burned with a tremulous ardour they never show in northern skies. The mystery of this African night rose not from vaporous veils and the long movement of winds, but was breathed out by clearness, brightness, stillness. It was the deepest of all mystery—the mystery of vastness and of peace.

No one was on the road. The sound of the horse’s feet were sharply distinct in the night. On all sides, but far off, the guard dogs were barking by the hidden homes of men. The air was warm as in a hothouse, but light and faintly impregnated with perfume shed surely by the mystical garments of night as she glided on with Domini towards the desert. From the blackness of the palms there came sometimes thin notes of the birds of night, the whizzing noise of insects, the glassy pipe of a frog in the reeds by a pool behind a hot brown wall.

She rode through one of the villages of old Beni-Mora, silent, unlighted, with empty streets and closed cafes maures, touched her horse with the whip, and cantered on at a quicker pace. As she drew near to the desert her desire to be in it increased. There was some coarse grass here. The palm trees grew less thickly. She heard more clearly the barking of the Kabyle dogs, and knew that tents were not far off. Now, between the trunks of the trees, she saw the twinkling of distant fires, and the sound of running water fell on her ears, mingling with the persistent noise of the insects, and the faint cries of the birds and frogs. In front, where the road came out from the shadows of the last trees, lay a vast dimness, not wholly unlike another starless sky, stretched beneath the starry sky in which the moon had not yet risen. She set her horse at a gallop and came into the desert, rushing through the dark.

“Madame! Madame!”

Batouch’s voice was calling her. She galloped faster, like one in flight. Her horse’s feet padded over sand almost as softly as a camel’s. The vast dimness was surely coming to meet her, to take her to itself in the night. But suddenly Batouch rode furiously up beside her, his burnous flying out behind him over his red saddle.

“Madame, we must not go further, we must keep near the oasis.”

“Why?”

“It is not safe at night in the desert, and besides—”

His horse plunged and nearly rocketed against hers. She pulled in. His company took away her desire to keep on.

“Besides?”

Leaning over his saddle peak he said, mysteriously:

“Besides, Madame, someone has been following us all the way from Beni-Mora.”

“Who?”

“A horseman. I have heard the beat of the hoofs on the hard road. Once I stopped and turned, but I could see nothing, and then I could hear nothing. He, too, had stopped. But when I rode on again soon I heard him once more. Someone found out we were going and has come after us.”

She looked back into the violet night without speaking. She heard no sound of a horse, saw nothing but the dim track and the faint, shadowy blackness where the palms began. Then she put her hand into the pocket of her saddle and silently held up a tiny revolver.

“I know, but there might be more than one. I am not afraid, but if anything happens to Madame no one will ever take me as a guide any more.”

She smiled for a moment, but the smile died away, and again she looked into the night. She was not afraid physically, but she was conscious of a certain uneasiness. The day had been long and troubled, and had left its mark upon her. Restlessness had driven her forth into the darkness, and behind the restlessness there was a hint of the terror of which she had been aware when she was left alone in the salle-a-manger. Was it not that vague terror which, shaking the restlessness, had sent her to the white house by the triple palm tree, had brought her now to the desert? she asked herself, while she listened, and the hidden horseman of whom Batouch had spoken became in her imagination one with the legendary victims of fate; with the Jew by the cross roads, the mariner beating ever about the rock-bound shores of the world, the climber in the witches’ Sabbath, the phantom Arab in the sand. Still holding her revolver, she turned her horse and rode slowly towards the distant fires, from which came the barking of the dogs. At some hundreds of yards from them she paused.

“I shall stay here,” she said to Batouch. “Where does the moon rise?”

He stretched his arm towards the desert, which sloped gently, almost imperceptibly, towards the east.

“Ride back a little way towards the oasis. The horseman was behind us. If he is still following you will meet him. Don’t go far. Do as I tell you, Batouch.”

With obvious reluctance he obeyed her. She saw him pull up his horse at a distance where he had her just in sight. Then she turned so that she could not see him and looked towards the desert and the east. The revolver seemed unnaturally heavy in her hand. She glanced at it for a moment and listened with intensity for the beat of horse’s hoofs, and her wakeful imagination created a sound that was non-existent in her ears. With it she heard a gallop that was spectral as the gallop of the black horses which carried Mephistopheles and Faust to the abyss. It died away almost at once, and she knew it for an imagination. To-night she was peopling the desert with phantoms. Even the fires of the nomads were as the fires that flicker in an abode of witches, the shadows that passed before them were as goblins that had come up out of the sand to hold revel in the moonlight. Were they, too, waiting for a signal from the sky?

At the thought of the moon she drew up the reins that had been lying loosely on her horse’s neck and rode some paces forward and away from the fires, still holding the revolver in her hand. Of what use would it be against the spectres of the Sahara? The Jew would face it without fear. Why not the horseman of Batouch? She dropped it into the pocket of the saddle.

Far away in the east the darkness of the sky was slowly fading into a luminous mystery that rose from the underworld, a mystery that at first was faint and tremulous, pale with a pallor of silver and primrose, but that deepened slowly into a live and ardent gold against which a group of three palm trees detached themselves from the desert like messengers sent forth by it to give a salutation to the moon. They were jet black against the gold, distinct though very distant. The night, and the vast plain from which they rose, lent them a significance that was unearthly. Their long, thin stems and drooping, feathery leaves were living and pathetic as the night thoughts of a woman who has suffered, but who turns, with a gesture of longing that will not be denied, to the luminance that dwells at the heart of the world. And those black palms against the gold, that stillness of darkness and light in immensity, banished Domini’s faint sense of horror. The spectres faded away. She fixed her eyes on the palms.

Now all the notes of the living things that do not sleep by night, but make music by reedy pools, in underwood, among the blades of grass and along the banks of streams, were audible to her again, filling her mind with the mystery of existence. The glassy note of the frogs was like a falling of something small and pointed upon a sheet of crystal. The whirs of the insects suggested a ceaselessly active mentality. The faint cries of the birds dropped down like jewels slipping from the trees. And suddenly she felt that she was as nothing in the vastness and the complication of the night. Even the passion that she knew lay, like a dark and silent flood, within her soul, a flood that, once released from its boundaries, had surely the power to rush irresistibly forward to submerge old landmarks and change the face of a world—even that seemed to lose its depth for a moment, to be shallow as the first ripple of a tide upon the sand. And she forgot that the first ripple has all the ocean behind it.

Red deepened and glowed in the gold behind the three palms, and the upper rim of the round moon, red too as blood, crept about the desert. Domini, leaning forward with one hand upon her horse’s warm neck, watched until the full circle was poised for a moment on the horizon, holding the palms in its frame of fire. She had never seen a moon look so immense and so vivid as this moon that came up into the night like a portent, fierce yet serene, moon of a barbaric world, such as might have shone upon Herod when he heard the voice of the Baptist in his dungeon, or upon the wife of Pilate when in a dream she was troubled. It suggested to her the powerful watcher of tragic events fraught with long chains of consequence that would last on through centuries, as it turned its blood-red gaze upon the desert, upon the palms, upon her, and, leaning upon her horse’s neck, she too—like Pilate’s wife—fell into a sort of strange and troubled dream for a moment, full of strong, yet ghastly, light and of shapes that flitted across a background of fire.

In it she saw the priest with a fanatical look of warning in his eyes, Count Anteoni beneath the trees of his garden, the perfume-seller in his dark bazaar, Irena with her long throat exposed and her thin arms drooping, the sand-diviner spreading forth his hands, Androvsky galloping upon a horse as if pursued. This last vision returned again and again. As the moon rose a stream of light that seemed tragic fell across the desert and was woven mysteriously into the light of her waking dream. The three palms looked larger. She fancied that she saw them growing, becoming monstrous as they stood in the very centre of the path of the nocturnal glory, and suddenly she remembered her thought when she sat with Androvsky in the garden, that feeling grew in human hearts like palms rising in the desert. But these palms were tragic and aspired towards the blood-red moon. Suddenly she was seized with a fear of feeling, of the growth of an intense sensation within her, and realised, with an almost feverish vividness, the impotence of a soul caught in the grip of a great passion, swayed hither and thither, led into strange paths, along the edges, perhaps into depths of immeasurable abysses. She had said to Androvsky that she would rather be the centre of a world tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost even if it were sorrow. Was that not the speech of a mad woman, or at least of a woman who was so ignorant of the life of feeling that her words were idle and ridiculous? Again she felt desperately that she did not know herself, and this lack of the most essential of all knowledge reduced her for a moment to a bitterness of despair that seemed worse than the bitterness of death. The vastness of the desert appalled her. The red moon held within its circle all the blood of the martyrs, of life, of ideals. She shivered in the saddle. Her nature seemed to shrink and quiver, and a cry for protection rose within her, the cry of the woman who cannot face life alone, who must find a protector, and who must cling to a strong arm, who needs man as the world needs God.

Then again it seemed to her that she saw Androvsky galloping upon a horse as if pursued.

Moved by a desire to do something to combat this strange despair, born of the moonrise and the night, she sat erect in her saddle, and resolutely looked at the desert, striving to get away from herself in a hard contemplation of the details that surrounded her, the outward things that were coming each moment into clearer view. She gazed steadily towards the palms that sharply cut the moonlight. As she did so something black moved away from them, as if it had been part of them and now detached itself with the intention of approaching her along the track. At first it was merely a moving blot, formless and small, but as it drew nearer she saw that it was a horseman riding slowly, perhaps stealthily, across the sand. She glanced behind her, and saw Batouch not far off, and the fires of the nomads. Then she turned again to watch the horseman. He came steadily forward.

“Madame!”

It was the voice of Batouch.

“Stay where you are!” she called out to him.

She heard the soft sound of the horse’s feet and could see the attitude of its rider. He was leaning forward as if searching the night. She rode to meet him, and they came to each other in the path of the light she had thought tragic.

“You followed me?”

“I cannot see you go out alone into the desert at night,” Androvsky replied.

“But you have no right to follow me.”

“I cannot let harm come to you, Madame.”

She was silent. A moment before she had been longing for a protector. One had come to her, the man whom she had been setting with those legendary figures who have saddened and appalled the imagination of men. She looked at the dark figure of Androvsky leaning forward on the horse whose feet were set on the path of the moon, and she did not know whether she felt confidence in him or fear of him. All that the priest had said rose up in her mind, all that Count Anteoni had hinted and that had been visible in the face of the sand-diviner. This man had followed her into the night as a guardian. Did she need someone, something, to guard her from him? A faint horror was still upon her. Perhaps he knew it and resented it, for he drew himself upright on his horse and spoke again, with a decision that was rare in him.

“Let me send Batouch back to Beni-Mora, Madame.”

“Why?” she asked, in a low voice that was full of hesitation.

“You do not need him now.”

He was looking at her with a defiant, a challenging expression that was his answer to her expression of vague distrust and apprehension.

“How do you know that?”

He did not answer the question, but only said:

“It is better here without him. May I send him away, Madame?”

She bent her head. Androvsky rode off and she saw him speaking to Batouch, who shook his head as if in contradiction.

“Batouch!” she called out. “You can ride back to Beni-Mora. We shall follow directly.”

The poet cantered forward.

“Madame, it is not safe.”

The sound of his voice made Domini suddenly know what she had not been sure of before—that she wished to be alone with Androvsky.

“Go, Batouch!” she said. “I tell you to go.”

Batouch turned his horse without a word, and disappeared into the darkness of the distant palms.

When they were alone together Domini and Androvsky sat silent on their horses for some minutes. Their faces were turned towards the desert, which was now luminous beneath the moon. Its loneliness was overpowering in the night, and made speech at first an impossibility, and even thought difficult. At last Androvsky said:

“Madame, why did you look at me like that just now, as if you—as if you hesitated to remain alone with me?”

Suddenly she resolved to tell him of her oppression of the night. She felt as if to do so would relieve her of something that was like a pain at her heart.

“Has it never occurred to you that we are strangers to each other?” she said. “That we know nothing of each other’s lives? What do you know of me or I of you?”

He shifted in his saddle and moved the reins from one hand to the other, but said nothing.

“Would it seem strange to you if I did hesitate—if even now—”

“Yes,” he interrupted violently, “it would seem strange to me.”

“Why?”

“You would rely on an Arab and not rely upon me,” he said with intense bitterness.

“I did not say so.”

“Yet at first you wished to keep Batouch.”

“Yes.”

“Then——”

“Batouch is my attendant.”

“And I? Perhaps I am nothing but a man whom you distrust; whom—whom others tell you to think ill of.”

“I judge for myself.”

“But if others speak ill of me?”

“It would not influence me——for long.”

She added the last words after a pause. She wished to be strictly truthful, and to-night she was not sure that the words of the priest had made no impression upon her.

“For long!” he repeated. Then he said abruptly, “The priest hates me.”

“No.”

“And Count Anteoni?”

“You interested Count Anteoni greatly.”

“Interested him!”

His voice sounded intensely suspicious in the night.

“Don’t you wish to interest anyone? It seems to me that to be uninteresting is to live eternally alone in a sunless desert.”

“I wish—I should like to think that I—” He stopped, then said, with a sort of ashamed determination: “Could I ever interest you, Madame?”

“Yes,” she answered quietly.

“But you would rather be protected by an Arab than by me. The priest has—”

“To-night I do not seem to be myself,” she said, interrupting him. “Perhaps there is some physical reason. I got up very early, and—don’t you ever feel oppressed, suspicious, doubtful of life, people, yourself, everything, without apparent reason? Don’t you know what it is to have nightmare without sleeping?”

“I! But you are different.”

“To-night I have felt—I do feel as if there were tragedy near me, perhaps coming towards me,” she said simply, “and I am oppressed, I am almost afraid.”

When she had said it she felt happier, as if a burden she carried were suddenly lighter. As he did not speak she glanced at him. The moon rays lit up his face. It looked ghastly, drawn and old, so changed that she scarcely recognised it and felt, for a moment, as if she were with a stranger. She looked away quickly, wondering if what she had seen was merely some strange effect of the moon, or whether Androvsky was really altered for a moment by the action of some terrible grief, one of those sudden sorrows that rush upon a man from the hidden depths of his nature and tear his soul, till his whole being is lacerated and he feels as if his soul were flesh and were streaming with the blood from mortal wounds. The silence between them was long. In it she presently heard a reiterated noise that sounded like struggle and pain made audible. It was Androvsky’s breathing. In the soft and exquisite air of the desert he was gasping like a man shut up in a cellar. She looked again towards him, startled. As she did so he turned his horse sideways and rode away a few paces. Then he pulled up his horse. He was now merely a black shape upon the moonlight, motionless and inaudible. She could not take her eyes from this shape. Its blackness suggested to her the blackness of a gulf. Her memory still heard that sound of deep-drawn breathing or gasping, heard it and quivered beneath it as a tender-hearted person quivers seeing a helpless creature being ill-used. She hesitated for a moment, and then, carried away by an irresistible impulse to try to soothe this extremity of pain which she was unable to understand, she rode up to Androvsky. When she reached him she did not know what she had meant to say or do. She felt suddenly impotent and intrusive, and even horribly shy. But before she had time for speech or action he turned to her and said, lifting up his hands with the reins in them and then dropping them down heavily upon his horse’s neck:

“Madame, I wanted to tell you that to-morrow I——” He stopped.

“Yes?” she said.

He turned his head away from her till she could not see his face.

“To-morrow I am leaving Beni-Mora.”

“To-morrow!” she said.

She did not feel the horse under her, the reins in her hand. She did not see the desert or the moon. Though she was looking at Androvsky she no longer perceived him. At the sound of his words it seemed to her as if all outside things she had ever known had foundered, like a ship whose bottom is ripped up by a razor-edged rock, as if with them had foundered, too, all things within herself: thoughts, feelings, even the bodily powers that were of the essence of her life; sense of taste, smell, hearing, sight, the capacity of movement and of deliberate repose. Nothing seemed to remain except the knowledge that she was still alive and had spoken.

“Yes, to-morrow I shall go away.”

His face was still turned from her, and his voice sounded as if it spoke to someone at a distance, someone who could hear as man cannot hear.

“To-morrow,” she repeated.

She knew she had spoken again, but it did not seem to her as if she had heard herself speak. She looked at her hands holding the reins, knew that she looked at them, yet felt as if she were not seeing them while she did so. The moonlit desert was surely flickering round her, and away to the horizon in waves that were caused by the disappearance of that ship which had suddenly foundered with all its countless lives. And she knew of the movement of these waves as the soul of one of the drowned, already released from the body, might know of the movement on the surface of the sea beneath which its body was hidden.

But the soul was evidently nothing without the body, or, at most, merely a continuance of power to know that all which had been was no more. All which had been was no more.

At last her mind began to work again, and those words went through it with persistence. She thought of the fascination of Africa, that enormous, overpowering fascination which had taken possession of her body and spirit. What had become of it? What had become of the romance of the palm gardens, of the brown villages, of the red mountains, of the white town with its lights, its white figures, its throbbing music? And the mystical attraction of the desert—where was it now? Its voice, that had called her persistently, was suddenly silent. Its hand, that had been laid upon her, was removed. She looked at it in the moonlight and it was no longer the desert, sand with a soul in it, blue distances full of a music of summons, spaces, peopled with spirits from the sun. It was only a barren waste of dried-up matter, arid, featureless, desolate, ghastly with the bones of things that had died.

She heard the dogs barking by the tents of the nomads and the noises of the insects, but still she did not feel the horse underneath her. Yet she was gradually recovering her powers, and their recovery brought with it sharp, physical pain, such as is felt by a person who has been nearly drowned and is restored from unconsciousness.

Androvsky turned round. She saw his eyes fastened upon her, and instantly pride awoke in her, and, with pride, her whole self.

She felt her horse under her, the reins in her hands, the stirrup at her foot. She moved in her saddle. The blood tingled in her veins fiercely, bitterly, as if it had become suddenly acrid. She felt as if her face were scarlet, as if her whole body flushed, and as if the flush could be seen by her companion. For a moment she was clothed from head to foot in a fiery garment of shame. But she faced Androvsky with calm eyes, and her lips smiled.

“You are tired of it?” she said.

“I never meant to stay long,” he answered, looking down.

“There is not very much to do here. Shall we ride back to the village now?”

She turned her horse, and as she did so cast one more glance at the three palm trees that stood far out on the path of the moon. They looked like three malignant fates lifting up their hands in malediction. For a moment she shivered in the saddle. Then she touched her horse with the whip and turned her eyes away. Androvsky followed her and rode by her side in silence.

To gain the oasis they passed near to the tents of the nomads, whose fires were dying out. The guard dogs were barking furiously, and straining at the cords which fastened them to the tent pegs, by the short hedges of brushwood that sheltered the doors of filthy rags. The Arabs were all within, no doubt huddled up on the ground asleep. One tent was pitched alone, at a considerable distance from the others, and under the first palms of the oasis. A fire smouldered before it, casting a flickering gleam of light upon something dark which lay upon the ground between it and the tent. Tied to the tent was a large white dog, which was not barking, but which was howling as if in agony of fear. Before Domini and Androvsky drew near to this tent the howling of the dog reached them and startled them. There was in it a note that seemed humanly expressive, as if it were a person trying to scream out words but unable to from horror. Both of them instinctively pulled up their horses, listened, then rode forward. When they reached the tent they saw the dark thing lying by the fire.

“What is it?” Domini whispered.

“An Arab asleep, I suppose,” Androvsky answered, staring at the motionless object.

“But the dog——” She looked at the white shape leaping frantically against the tent. “Are you sure?”

“It must be. Look, it is wrapped in rags and the head is covered.”

“I don’t know.”

She stared at it. The howling of the dog grew louder, as if it were straining every nerve to tell them something dreadful.

“Do you mind getting off and seeing what it is? I’ll hold the horse.”

He swung himself out of the saddle. She caught his rein and watched him go forward to the thing that lay by the fire, bend down over it, touch it, recoil from it, then—as if with a determined effort—kneel down beside it on the ground and take the rags that covered it in his hands. After a moment of contemplation of what they had hidden he dropped the rags—or rather threw them from him with a violent gesture—got up and came back to Domini, and looked at her without speaking. She bent down.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a dead woman.”

It seemed to her as if the dark thing lying by the fire was herself.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a woman who has been strangled.”

“Poor woman!” she said. “Poor—poor woman!”

And it seemed to her as if she said it of herself.