The Arabs have a saying, “In the desert one forgets everything, one remembers nothing any more.”

To Domini it sometimes seemed the truest of all the true and beautiful sayings of the East. Only three weeks had passed away since the first halt at Arba, yet already her life at Beni-Mora was faint in her mind as the dream of a distant past. Taken by the vast solitudes, journeying without definite aim from one oasis to another through empty regions bathed in eternal sunshine, camping often in the midst of the sand by one of the wells sunk for the nomads by the French engineers, strengthened perpetually, yet perpetually soothed, by airs that were soft and cool, as if mingled of silk and snow, they lived surely in a desert dream with only a dream behind them. They had become as one with the nomads, whose home is the moving tent, whose hearthstone is the yellow sand of the dunes, whose God is liberty.

Domini loved this life with a love which had already become a passion. All that she had imagined that the desert might be to her she found that it was. In its so-called monotony she discovered eternal interest. Of old she had thought the sea the most wonderful thing in Nature. In the desert she seemed to possess the sea with something added to it, a calm, a completeness, a mystical tenderness, a passionate serenity. She thought of the sea as a soul striving to fulfil its noblest aspirations, to be the splendid thing it knew how to dream of. But she thought of the desert as a soul that need strive no more, having attained. And she, like the Arabs, called it always in her heart the Garden of Allah. For in this wonderful calm, bright as the child’s idea of heaven; clear as a crystal with a sunbeam caught in it, silent as a prayer that will be answered silently, God seemed to draw very near to His wandering children. In the desert was the still, small voice, and the still, small voice was the Lord.

Often at dawn or sundown, when, perhaps in the distance of the sands, or near at hand beneath the shade of the palms of some oasis by a waterspring, she watched the desert men in their patched rags, with their lean, bronzed faces and eagle eyes turned towards Mecca, bowing their heads in prayer to the soil that the sun made hot, she remembered Count Anteoni’s words, “I like to see men praying in the desert,” and she understood with all her heart and soul why. For the life of the desert was the most perfect liberty that could be found on earth, and to see men thus worshipping in liberty set before her a vision of free will upon the heights. When she thought of the world she had known and left, of the men who would always live in it and know no other world, she was saddened for a moment. Could she ever find elsewhere such joy as she had found in the simple and unfettered life of the wastes? Could she ever exchange this life for another life, even with Androvsky?

One day she spoke to him of her intense joy in the wandering fate, and the pain that came to her whenever she thought of exchanging it for a life of civilisation in the midst of fixed groups of men.

They had halted for the noonday rest at a place called Sidi-Hamdam, and in the afternoon were going to ride on to a Bordj called Mogar, where they meant to stay two or three days, as Batouch had told them it was a good halting place, and near to haunts of the gazelle. The tents had already gone forward, and Domini and Androvsky were lying upon a rug spread on the sand, in the shadow of the grey wall of a traveller’s house beside a well. Behind them their horses were tethered to an iron ring in the wall. Batouch and Ali were in the court of the house, talking to the Arab guardian who dwelt there, but their voices were not audible by the well, and absolute silence reigned, the intense yet light silence that is in the desert at noontide, when the sun is at the zenith, when the nomad sleeps under his low-pitched tent, and the gardeners in the oasis cease even from pretending to work among the palms. From before the well the ground sank to a plain of pale grey sand, which stretched away to a village hard in aspect, as if carved out of bronze and all in one piece. In the centre of it rose a mosque with a minaret and a number of cupolas, faintly gilded and shining modestly under the fierce rays of the sun.

At the foot of the village the ground was white with saltpetre, which resembled a covering of new-fallen snow. To right and left of it were isolated groups of palms growing in threes and fours, like trees that had formed themselves into cliques and set careful barriers of sand between themselves and their despised brethren. Here and there on the grey sand dark patches showed where nomads had pitched their tents. But there was no movement of human life. No camels were visible. No guard dogs barked. The noon held all things in its golden grip.

“Boris!” Domini said, breaking a long silence.

“Yes, Domini?”

He turned towards her on the rug, stretching his long, thin body lazily as if in supreme physical contentment.

“You know that saying of the Arabs about forgetting everything in the desert?”

“Yes, Domini, I know it.”

“How long shall we stay in this world of forgetfulness?”

He lifted himself up on his elbow quickly, and fixed his eyes on hers.

“How long!”

“Yes.”

“But—do you wish to leave it? Are you tired of it?”

There was a note of sharp anxiety in his voice.

“I don’t answer such a question,” she said, smiling at him.

“Ah, then, why do you try to frighten me?”

She put her hand in his.

“How burnt you are!” she said. “You are like an Arab of the South.”

“Let me become more like one. There’s health here.”

“And peace, perfect peace.”

He said nothing. He was looking down now at the sand.

She laid her lips on his warm brown hand.

“There’s all I want here,” she added.

“Let us stay here.”

“But some day we must go back, mustn’t we?”

“Why?”

“Can anything be lifelong—even our honeymoon?”

“Suppose we choose that it shall be?”

“Can we choose such a thing? Is anybody allowed to choose to live always quite happily without duties? Sometimes I wonder. I love this wandering life so much, I am so happy in it, that I sometimes think it cannot last much longer.”

He began to sift the sand through his fingers swiftly.

“Duties?” he said in a low voice.

“Yes. Oughtn’t we to do something presently, something besides being happy?”

“What do you mean, Domini?”

“I hardly know, I don’t know. You tell me.”

There was an urging in her voice, as if she wanted, almost demanded, something of him.

“You mean that a man must do some work in his life if he is to keep himself a man,” he said, not as if he were asking a question.

He spoke reluctantly but firmly.

“You know,” he added, “that I have worked hard all my life, hard like a labourer.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

She stroked his hand, that was worn and rough, and spoke eloquently of manual toil it had accomplished in the past.

“I know. Before we were married, that day when we sat in the garden, you told me your life and I told you mine. How different they have been!”

“Yes,” he said.

He lit a cigar and watched the smoke curling up into the gold of the sunlit atmosphere.

“Mine in the midst of the world and yours so far away from it. I often imagine that little place, El Krori, the garden, your brother, your twin-brother Stephen, that one-eyed Arab servant—what was his name?”

“El Magin.”

“Yes, El Magin, who taught you to play Cora and to sing Arab songs, and to eat cous-cous with your fingers. I can almost see Father Andre, from whom you learnt to love the Classics, and who talked to you of philosophy. He’s dead too, isn’t he, like your mother?”

“I don’t know whether Pere Andre is dead. I have lost sight of him,” Androvsky said.

He still looked steadily at the rings of smoke curling up into the golden air. There was in his voice a sound of embarrassment. She guessed that it came from the consciousness of the pain he must have caused the good priest who had loved him when he ceased from practising the religion in which he had been brought up. Even to her he never spoke frankly on religious subjects, but she knew that he had been baptised a Catholic and been educated for a time by priests. She knew, too, that he was no longer a practising Catholic, and that, for some reason, he dreaded any intimacy with priests. He never spoke against them. He had scarcely ever spoken of them to her. But she remembered his words in the garden, “I do not care for priests.” She remembered, too, his action in the tunnel on the day of his arrival in Beni-Mora. And the reticence that they both preserved on the subject of religion, and its reason, were the only causes of regret in this desert dream of hers. Even this regret, too, often faded in hope. For in the desert, the Garden of Allah, she had it borne in upon her that Androvsky would discover what he must surely secretly be seeking—the truth that each man must find for himself, truth for him of the eventual existence in which the mysteries of this present existence will be made plain, and of the Power that has fashioned all things.

And she was able to hope in silence, as women do for the men they love.

“Don’t think I do not realise that you have worked,” she went on after a pause. “You told me how you always cultivated the land yourself, even when you were still a boy, that you directed the Spanish labourers in the vineyards, that—you have earned a long holiday. But should it last for ever?”

“You are right. Well, let us take an oasis; let us become palm gardeners like that Frenchman at Meskoutine.”

“And build ourselves an African house, white, with a terrace roof.”

“And sell our dates. We can give employment to the Arabs. We can choose the poorest. We can improve their lives. After all, if we owe a debt to anyone it is to them, to the desert. Let us pay our debt to the desert men and live in the desert.”

“It would be an ideal life,” she said with her eyes shining on his.

“And a possible life. Let us live it. I could not bear to leave the desert. Where should we go?”

“Where should we go!” she repeated.

She was still looking at him, but now the expression of her eyes had quite changed. They had become grave, and examined him seriously with a sort of deep inquiry. He sat upon the Arab rug, leaning his back against the wall of the traveller’s house.

“Why do you look at me like that, Domini?” he asked with a sudden stirring of something that was like uneasiness.

“I! I was wondering what you would like, what other life would suit you.”

“Yes?” he said quickly. “Yes?”

“It’s very strange, Boris, but I cannot connect you with anything but the desert, or see you anywhere but in the desert. I cannot even imagine you among your vines in Tunisia.”

“They were not altogether mine,” he corrected, still with a certain excitement which he evidently endeavoured to repress. “I—I had the right, the duty of cultivating the land.”

“Well, however it was, you were always at work; you were responsible, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t see you even in the vineyards or the wheat-fields. Isn’t it strange?”

She was always looking at him with the same deep and wholly unselfconscious inquiry.

“And as to London, Paris—”

Suddenly she burst into a little laugh and her gravity vanished.

“I think you would hate them,” she said. “And they—they wouldn’t like you because they wouldn’t understand you.”

“Let us buy our oasis,” he said abruptly. “Build our African house, sell our dates and remain in the desert. I hear Batouch. It must be time to ride on to Mogar. Batouch! Batouch!”

Batouch came from the courtyard of the house wiping the remains of a cous-cous from his languid lips.

“Untie the horses,” said Androvsky.

“But, Monsieur, it is still too hot to travel. Look! No one is stirring. All the village is asleep.”

He waved his enormous hand, with henna-tinted nails, towards the distant town, carved surely out of one huge piece of bronze.

“Untie the horses. There are gazelle in the plain near Mogar. Didn’t you tell me?”

“Yes, Monsieur, but—”

“We’ll get there early and go out after them at sunset. Now, Domini.”

They rode away in the burning heat of the noon towards the southwest across the vast plains of grey sand, followed at a short distance by Batouch and Ali.

“Monsieur is mad to start in the noon,” grumbled Batouch. “But Monsieur is not like Madame. He may live in the desert till he is old and his hair is grey as the sand, but he will never be an Arab in his heart.”

“Why, Batouch-ben-Brahim?”

“He cannot rest. To Madame the desert gives its calm, but to Monsieur—” He did not finish his sentence. In front Domini and Androvsky had put their horses to a gallop. The sand flew up in a thin cloud around them.

“Nom d’un chien!” said Batouch, who, in unpoetical moments, occasionally indulged in the expletives of the French infidels who were his country’s rulers. “What is there in the mind of Monsieur which makes him ride as if he fled from an enemy?”

“I know not, but he goes like a hare before the sloughi, Batouch-ben Brahim,” answered Ali, gravely.

Then they sent their horses on in chase of the cloud of sand towards the southwest.

About four in the afternoon they reached the camp at Mogar.

As they rode in slowly, for their horses were tired and streaming with heat after their long canter across the sands, both Domini and Androvsky were struck by the novelty of this halting-place, which was quite unlike anything they had yet seen. The ground rose gently but continuously for a considerable time before they saw in the distance the pitched tents with the dark forms of the camels and mules. Here they were out of the sands, and upon hard, sterile soil covered with small stones embedded in the earth. Beyond the tents they could see nothing but the sky, which was now covered with small, ribbed grey clouds, sad-coloured and autumnal, and a lonely tower built of stone, which rose from the waste at about two hundred yards from the tents to the east. Although they could see so little, however, they were impressed with a sensation that they were on the edge of some vast vision, of some grandiose effect of Nature, that would bring to them a new and astonishing knowledge of the desert. Perhaps it was the sight of the distant tower pointing to the grey clouds that stirred in them this almost excited feeling of expectation.

“It is like a watch-tower,” Domini said, pointing with her whip. “But who could live in such a place, far from any oasis?”

“And what can it overlook?” said Androvsky. “This is the nearest horizon line we have seen since we came into the desert.”

“Yes, but——”

She glanced at him as they put their horses into a gentle canter. Then she added:

“You, too, feel that we are coming to something tremendous, don’t you?”

Her horse whinnied shrilly. Domini stroked his foam-flecked neck with her hand.

“Abou is as full of anticipation as we are,” she said. Androvsky was looking towards the tower.

“That was built for French soldiers,” he said. A moment afterwards he added:

“I wonder why Batouch chose this place for us to camp in?”

There was a faint sound as of irritation in his voice.

“Perhaps we shall know in a minute,” Domini answered. They cantered on. Their horses’ hoofs rang with a hard sound on the stony ground.

“It’s inhospitable here,” Androvsky said. She looked at him in surprise.

“I never knew you to take a dislike to any halting-place before,” she said. “What’s the matter, Boris?”

He smiled at her, but almost immediately his face was clouded by the shadow of a gloom that seemed to respond to the gloom of the sky. And he fixed his eyes again upon the tower.

“I like a far horizon,” he answered. “And there’s no sun to-day.”

“I suppose even in the desert we cannot have it always,” she said. And in her voice, too, there was a touch of melancholy, as if she had caught his mood. A minute later she added:

“I feel exactly as if I were on a hill top and were coming to a view of the sea.”

Almost as she spoke they cantered in among the tents of the attendants, and reined in their horses at the edge of a slope that was almost a precipice. Then they sat still in their saddles, gazing.

They had been living for weeks in the midst of vastness, and had become accustomed to see stretched out around them immense tracts of land melting away into far blue distances, but this view from Mogar made them catch their breath and stiffed their pulses.

It was gigantic. There was even something unnatural in its appearance of immensity, as if it were, perhaps, deceptive, and existed in their vision of it only. So, surely, might look a plain to one who had taken haschish, which enlarges, makes monstrous and threateningly terrific. Domini had a feeling that no human eyes could really see such infinite tracts of land and water as those she seemed to be seeing at this moment. For there was water here, in the midst of the desert. Infinite expanses of sea met infinite plains of snow. Or so it seemed to both of them. And the sea was grey and calm as a winter sea, breathing its plaint along a winter land. From it, here and there, rose islets whose low cliffs were a deep red like the red of sandstone, a sad colour that suggests tragedy, islets that looked desolate, and as if no life had ever been upon them, or could be. Back from the snowy plains stretched sand dunes of the palest primrose colour, sand dunes innumerable, myriads and myriads of them, rising and falling, rising and falling, till they were lost in the grey distance of this silent world. In the foreground, at their horses’ feet, wound from the hill summit a broad track faintly marked in the deep sand, and flanked by huge dunes shaped, by the action of the winds, into grotesque semblances of monsters, leviathans, beasts with prodigious humps, sphinxes, whales. This track was presently lost in the blanched plains. Far away, immeasurably far, sea and snow blended and faded into the cloudy grey. Above the near dunes two desert eagles were slowly wheeling in a weary flight, occasionally sinking towards the sand, then rising again towards the clouds. And the track was strewn with the bleached bones of camels that had perished, or that had been slaughtered, on some long desert march.

To the left of them the solitary tower commanded this terrific vision of desolation, seemed to watch it steadily, yet furtively, with its tiny loophole eyes.

“We have come into winter,” Domini murmured.

She looked at the white of the camels’ bones, of the plains, at the grey white of the sky, at the yellow pallor of the dunes.

“How wonderful! How terrible!” she said.

She drew her horse to one side, a little nearer to Androvsky’s.

“Does the Russian in you greet this land?” she asked him.

He did not reply. He seemed to be held in thrall by the sad immensity before them.

“I realise here what it must be to die in the desert, to be killed by it—by hunger, by thirst in it,” she said presently, speaking, as if to herself, and looking out over the mirage sea, the mirage snow. “This is the first time I have really felt the terror of the desert.”

Her horse drooped its head till its nose nearly touched the earth, and shook itself in a long shiver. She shivered too, as if constrained to echo an animal’s distress.

“Things have died here,” Androvsky said, speaking at last in a low voice and pointing with his long-lashed whip towards the camels’ skeletons. “Come, Domini, the horses are tired.”

He cast another glance at the tower, and they dismounted by their tent, which was pitched at the very edge of the steep slope that sank down to the beast-like shapes of the near dunes.

An hour later Domini said to Androvsky:

“You won’t go after gazelle this evening surely?”

They had been having coffee in the tent and had just finished. Androvsky got up from his chair and went to the tent door. The grey of the sky was pierced by a gleaming shaft from the sun.

“Do you mind if I go?” he said, turning towards her after a glance to the desert.

“No, but aren’t you tired?”

He shook his head.

“I couldn’t ride, and now I can ride. I couldn’t shoot, and I’m just beginning—”

“Go,” she said quickly. “Besides, we want gazelle for dinner, Batouch says, though I don’t suppose we should starve without it.” She came to the tent door and stood beside him, and he put his arm around her.

“If I were alone here, Boris,” she said, leaning against his shoulder, “I believe I should feel horribly sad to-day.”

“Shall I stay?”

He pressed her against him.

“No. I shall know you are coming back. Oh, how extraordinary it is to think we lived so many years without knowing of each other’s existence, that we lived alone. Were you ever happy?”

He hesitated before he replied.

“I sometimes thought I was.”

“But do you think now you ever really were?”

“I don’t know—perhaps in a lonely sort of way.”

“You can never be happy in that way now?”

He said nothing, but, after a moment, he kissed her long and hard, and as if he wanted to draw her being into his through the door of his lips.

“Good-bye,” he said, releasing her. “I shall be back directly after sundown.”

“Yes. Don’t wait for the dark down there. If you were lost in the dunes!”

She pointed to the distant sand hills rising and falling monotonously to the horizon.

“If you are not back in good time,” she said, “I shall stand by the tower and wave a brand from the fire.”

“Why by the tower?”

“The ground is highest by the tower.”

She watched him ride away on a mule, with two Arabs carrying guns. They went towards the plains of saltpetre that looked like snow beside the sea that was only a mirage. Then she turned back into the tent, took up a volume of Fromentin’s, and sat down in a folding-chair at the tent door. She read a little, but it was difficult to read with the mirage beneath her. Perpetually her eyes were attracted from the book to its mystery and plaintive sadness, that was like the sadness of something unearthly, of a spirit that did not move but that suffered. She did not put away the book, but presently she laid it down on her knees, open, and sat gazing. Androvsky had disappeared with the Arabs into some fold of the sands. The sun-ray had vanished with him. Without Androvsky and the sun—she still connected them together, and knew she would for ever.

The melancholy of this desert scene was increased for her till it became oppressive and lay upon her like a heavy weight. She was not a woman inclined to any morbid imaginings. Indeed, all that was morbid roused in her an instinctive disgust. But the sudden greyness of the weather, coming after weeks of ardent sunshine, and combined with the fantastic desolation of the landscape, which was half real and half unreal, turned her for the moment towards a dreariness of spirit that was rare in her.

She realised suddenly, as she looked and did not see Androvsky even as a black and moving speck upon the plain; what the desert would seem to her without him, even in sunshine, the awfulness of the desolation of it, the horror of its distances. And realising this she also realised the uncertainty of the human life in connection with any other human life. To be dependent on another is to double the sum of the terrors of uncertainty. She had done that.

If the immeasurable sands took Androvsky and never gave him back to her! What would she do?

She gazed at the mirage sea with its dim red islands, and at the sad white plains along its edge.

Winter—she would be plunged in eternal winter. And each human life hangs on a thread. All deep love, all consuming passion, holds a great fear within the circle of a great glory. To-day the fear within the circle of her glory seemed to grow. But she suddenly realised that she ought to dominate it, to confine it—as it were—to its original and permanent proportions.

She got up, came out upon the edge of the hill, and walked along it slowly towards the tower.

Outside, freed from the shadow of the tent, she felt less oppressed, though still melancholy, and even slightly apprehensive, as if some trouble were coming to her and were near at hand. Mentally she had made the tower the limit of her walk, and therefore when she reached it she stood still.

It was a squat, square tower, strongly constructed, with loopholes in the four sides, and now that she was by it she saw built out at the back of it a low house with small shuttered windows and a narrow courtyard for mules. No doubt Androvsky was right and French soldiers had once been here to work the optic telegraph. She thought of the recruits and of Marseilles, of Notre Dame de la Garde, the Mother of God, looking towards Africa. Such recruits came to live in such strange houses as this tower lost in the desert and now abandoned. She glanced at the shuttered windows and turned back towards the tent; but something in the situation of the tower—perhaps the fact that it was set on the highest point of the ground—attracted her, and she presently made Batouch bring her out some rugs and ensconced herself under its shadow, facing the mirage sea.

How long she sat there she did not know. Mirage hypnotises the imaginative and suggests to them dreams strange and ethereal, sad sometimes, as itself. How long she might have sat there dreaming, but for an interruption, she knew still less. It was towards evening, however, but before evening had fallen, that a weary and travel-stained party of three French soldiers, Zouaves, and an officer rode slowly up the sandy track from the dunes. They were mounted on mules, and carried their small baggage with them on two led mules. When they reached the top of the hill they turned to the right and came towards the tower. The officer was a little in advance of his men. He was a smart-looking, fair man of perhaps thirty-two, with blonde moustaches, blue eyes with blonde lashes, and hair very much the colour of the sand dunes. His face was bright red, burnt, as a fair delicate skin burns, by the sun. His eyes, although protected by large sun spectacles, were inflamed. The skin was peeling from his nose. His hair was full of sand, and he rode leaning forward over his animal’s neck, holding the reins loosely in his hands, that seemed nerveless from fatigue. Yet he looked smart and well-bred despite his evident exhaustion, as if on parade he would be a dashing officer. It was evident that both he and his men were riding in from some tremendous journey. The latter looked dog-tired, scarcely human in their collapse. They kept on their mules with difficulty, shaking this way and that like sacks, with their unshaven chins wagging loosely up and down. But as they saw the tower they began to sing in chorus half under their breath, and leaning their broad hands on the necks of the beasts for support they looked with a sort of haggard eagerness in its direction.

Domini was roused from her contemplation of the mirage and the daydreams it suggested by the approach of this small cavalcade. The officer was almost upon her ere she heard the clatter of his mule among the stones. She looked up, startled, and he looked down, even more surprised, apparently, to see a lady ensconced at the foot of the tower. His astonishment and exhaustion did not, however, get the better of his instinctive good breeding, and sitting straight up in the saddle he took off his sun helmet and asked Domini’s pardon for disturbing her.

“But this is my home for the night, Madame,” he added, at the same time drawing a key from the pocket of his loose trousers. “And I’m thankful to reach it. Ma foi! there have been several moments in the last days when I never thought to see Mogar.”

Slowly he swung himself off his mule and stood up, catching on to the saddle with one hand.

“F-f-f-f!” he said, pursing his lips. “I can hardly stand. Excuse me, Madame.”

Domini had got up.

“You are tired out,” she said, looking at him and his men, who had now come up, with interest.

“Pretty well indeed. We have been three days lost in the great dunes in a sand-storm, and hit the track here just as we were preparing for a—well, a great event.”

“A great event?” said Domini.

“The last in a man’s life, Madame.”

He spoke simply, even with a light touch of humour that was almost cynical, but she felt beneath his words and manner a solemnity and a thankfulness that attracted and moved her.

“Those terrible dunes!” she said.

And, turning, she looked out over them.

There was no sunset, but the deepening of the grey into a dimness that seemed to have blackness behind it, the more ghastly hue of the white plains of saltpetre, and the fading of the mirage sea, whose islands now looked no longer red, but dull brown specks in a pale mist, hinted at the rapid falling of night.

“My husband is out in them,” she added.

“Your husband, Madame!”

He looked at her rather narrowly, shifted from one leg to the other as if trying his strength, then added:

“Not far, though, I suppose. For I see you have a camp here.”

“He has only gone after gazelle.”

As she said the last word she saw one of the soldiers, a mere boy, lick his lips and give a sort of tragic wink at his companions. A sudden thought struck her.

“Don’t think me impertinent, Monsieur, but—what about provisions in your tower?”

“Oh, as to that, Madame, we shall do well enough. Here, open the door, Marelle!”

And he gave the key to a soldier, who wearily dismounted and thrust it into the door of the tower.

“But after three days in the dunes! Your provisions must be exhausted unless you’ve been able to replenish them.”

“You are too good, Madame. We shall manage a cous-cous.”

“And wine? Have you any wine?”

She glanced again at the exhausted soldiers covered with sand and saw that their eyes were fixed upon her and were shining eagerly. All the “good fellow” in her nature rose up.

“You must let me send you some,” she said. “We have plenty.”

She thought of some bottles of champagne they had brought with them and never opened.

“In the desert we are all comrades,” she added, as if speaking to the soldiers.

They looked at her with an open adoration which lit up their tired faces.

“Madame,” said the officer, “you are much too good; but I accept your offer as frankly as you have made it. A little wine will be a godsend to us to-night. Thank you, Madame.”

The soldiers looked as if they were going to cheer.

“I’ll go to the camp—”

“Cannot one of the men go for you, Madame? You were sitting here. Pray, do not let us disturb you.”

“But night is falling and I shall have to go back in a moment.”

While they had been speaking the darkness had rapidly increased. She looked towards the distant dunes and no longer saw them. At once her mind went to Androvsky. Why had he not returned? She thought of the signal. From the camp, behind their sleeping-tent, rose the flames of a newly-made fire.

“If one of your men can go and tell Batouch—Batouch—to come to me here I shall be grateful,” she answered. “And I want him to bring me a big brand from the fire over there.”

She saw wonder dawning in the eyes fixed upon her, and smiled.

“I want to signal to my husband,” she said, “and this is the highest point. He will see it best if I stand here.”

“Go, Marelle, ask for Batouch, and be sure you bring the brand from the fire.”

The man saluted and rode off with alacrity. The thought of wine had infused a gaiety into him and his companions.

“Now, Monsieur, don’t stand on ceremony,” Domini said to the officer. “Go in and make your toilet. You are longing to, I know.”

“I am longing to look a little more decent—now, Madame,” he said gallantly, and gazing at her with a sparkle of admiration in his inflamed eyes. “You will let me return in a moment to escort you to the camp.”

“Thank you.”

“Will you permit me—my name is De Trevignac.”

“And mine is Madame Androvsky.”

“Russian!” the officer said. “The alliance in the desert! Vive la Russie!”

She laughed.

“That is for my husband, for I am English.”

“Vive l’Angleterre!” he said.

The two soldier echoed his words impulsively, lifting up in the gathering darkness hoarse voices.

“Vive l’Angleterre!”

“Thank you, thank you,” she said. “Now, Monsieur, please don’t let me keep you.”

“I shall be back directly,” the officer replied.

And he turned and went into the tower, while the soldiers rode round to the court, tugging at the cords of the led mules.

Domini waited for the return of Marelle. Her mood had changed. A glow of cordial humanity chased away her melancholy. The hostess that lurks in every woman—that housewife-hostess sense which goes hand-in-hand with the mother sense—was alive in her. She was keenly anxious to play the good fairy simply, unostentatiously, to these exhausted men who had come to Mogar out of the jaws of Death, to see their weary faces shine under the influence of repose and good cheer. But the tower looked desolate. The camp was gayer, cosier. Suddenly she resolved to invite them all to dine in the camp that night.

Marelle returned with Batouch. She saw them from a distance coming through the darkness with blazing torches in their hands. When they came to her she said:

“Batouch, I want you to order dinner in camp for the soldiers.”

A broad and radiant smile irradiated the blunt Breton features of Marelle.

“And Monsieur the officer will dine with me and Monsieur. Give us all you can. Perhaps there will be some gazelle.”

She saw him opening his lips to say that the dinner would be poor and stopped him.

“You are to open some of the champagne—the Pommery. We will drink to all safe returns. Now, give me the brand and go and tell the cook.”

As he took his torch and disappeared into the darkness De Trevignac came out from the tower. He still looked exhausted and walked with some difficulty, but he had washed the sand from his face with water from the artesian well behind the tower, changed his uniform, brushed the sand from his yellow hair, and put on a smart gold-laced cap instead of his sun-helmet. The spectacles were gone from his eyes, and between his lips was a large Havana—his last, kept by him among the dunes as a possible solace in the dreadful hour of death.

“Monsieur de Trevignac, I want you to dine with us in camp to-night—only to dine. We won’t keep you from your bed one moment after the coffee and the cognac. You must seal the triple alliance—France, Russia, England—in some champagne.”

She had spoken gaily, cordially. She added more gravely:

“One doesn’t escape from death among the dunes every day. Will you come?”

She held out her hand frankly, as a man might to another man. He pressed it as a man presses a woman’s hand when he is feeling very soft and tender.

“Madame, what can I say, but that you are too good to us poor fellows and that you will find it very difficult to get rid of us, for we shall be so happy in your camp that we shall forget all about our tower.”

“That’s settled then.”

With the brand in her hand she walked to the edge of the hill. De Trevignac followed her. He had taken the other brand from Marelle. They stood side by side, overlooking the immense desolation that was now almost hidden in the night.

“You are going to signal to your husband, Madame?”

“Yes.”

“Let me do it for you. See, I have the other brand!”

“Thank you—but I will do it.”

In the light of the flame that leaped up as if striving to touch her face he saw a light in her eyes that he understood, and he drooped his torch towards the earth while she lifted hers on high and waved it in the blackness.

He watched her. The tall, strong, but exquisitely supple figure, the uplifted arm with the torch sending forth a long tongue of golden flame, the ardent and unconscious pose, that set before him a warm passionate heart calling to another heart without shame, made him think of her as some Goddess of the Sahara. He had let his torch droop towards the earth, but, as she waved hers, he had an irresistible impulse to join her in the action she made heroic and superb. And presently he lifted his torch, too, and waved it beside hers in the night.

She smiled at him in the flames.

“He must see them surely,” she said.

From below, in the distance of the desert, there rose a loud cry in a strong man’s voice.

“Aha!” she exclaimed.

She called out in return in a warm, powerful voice. The man’s voice answered, nearer. She dropped her brand to the earth.

“Monsieur, you will come then—in half an hour?”

“Madame, with the most heartfelt pleasure. But let me accompany—”

“No, I am quite safe. And bring your men with you. We’ll make the best feast we can for them. And there’s enough champagne for all.”

Then she went away quickly, eagerly, into the darkness.

“To be her husband!” murmured De Trevignac. “Lucky—lucky fellow!” And he dropped his brand beside hers on the ground, and stood watching the two flames mingle.

“Lucky—lucky fellow!” he said again aloud. “I wonder what he’s like.”