Lying in bed in the dark that night Domini heard the church clock chime the hours. She was not restless, though she was wakeful. Indeed, she felt like a woman to whom an injection of morphia had been administered, as if she never wished to move again. She lay there counting the minutes that made the passing hours, counting them calmly, with an inexorable and almost cold self-possession. The process presently became mechanical, and she was able, at the same time, to dwell upon the events that had followed upon the discovery of the murdered woman by the tent: Androvsky’s pulling aside of the door of the tent to find it empty, their short ride to the encampment close by, their rousing up of the sleeping Arabs within, filthy nomads clothed in patched garments, unveiled women with wrinkled, staring faces and huge plaits of false hair and amulets. From the tents the strange figures had streamed forth into the light of the moon and the fading fires, gesticulating, talking loudly, furiously, in an uncouth language that was unintelligible to her. Led by Androvsky they had come to the corpse, while the air was rent by the frantic barking of all the guard dogs and the howling of the dog that had been a witness of the murder. Then in the night had risen the shrill wailing of the women, a wailing that seemed to pierce the stars and shudder out to the remotest confines of the desert, and in the cold white radiance of the moon a savage vision of grief had been presented to her eyes: naked arms gesticulating as if they strove to summon vengeance from heaven, claw-like hands casting earth upon the heads from which dangled Fatma hands, chains of tarnished silver and lumps of coral that reminded her of congealed blood, bodies that swayed and writhed as if stricken with convulsions or rent by seven devils. She remembered how strange had seemed to her the vast calm, the vast silence, that encompassed this noisy outburst of humanity, how inflexible had looked the enormous moon, how unsympathetic the brightly shining stars, how feverish and irritable the flickering illumination of the flames that spurted up and fainted away like things still living but in the agonies of death.

Then had followed her silent ride back to Beni-Mora with Androvsky along the straight road which had always fascinated her spirit of adventure. They had ridden slowly, without looking at each other, without exchanging a word. She had felt dry and weary, like an old woman who had passed through a long life of suffering and emerged into a region where any acute feeling is unable to exist, as at a certain altitude from the earth human life can no longer exist. The beat of the horses’ hoofs upon the road had sounded hard, as her heart felt, cold as the temperature of her mind. Her body, which usually swayed to her horse’s slightest movement, was rigid in the saddle. She recollected that once, when her horse stumbled, she had thrilled with an abrupt anger that was almost ferocious, and had lifted her whip to lash it. But the hand had slipped down nervelessly, and she had fallen again into her frigid reverie.

When they reached the hotel she had dropped to the ground, heavily, and heavily had ascended the steps of the verandah, followed by Androvsky. Without turning to him or bidding him good-night she had gone to her room. She had not acted with intentional rudeness or indifference—indeed, she had felt incapable of an intention. Simply, she had forgotten, for the first time perhaps in her life, an ordinary act of courtesy, as an old person sometimes forgets you are there and withdraws into himself. Androvsky had said nothing, had not tried to attract her attention to himself. She had heard his steps die away on the verandah. Then, mechanically, she had undressed and got into bed, where she was now mechanically counting the passing moments.

Presently she became aware of her own stillness and connected it with the stillness of the dead woman, by the tent. She lay, as it were, watching her own corpse as a Catholic keeps vigil beside a body that has not yet been put into the grave. But in this chamber of death there were no flowers, no lighted candles, no lips that moved in prayer. She had gone to bed without praying. She remembered that now, but with indifference. Dead people do not pray. The living pray for them. But even the watcher could not pray. Another hour struck in the belfry of the church. She listened to the chime and left off counting the moments, and this act of cessation made more perfect the peace of the dead woman.

When the sun rose her sensation of death passed away, leaving behind it, however, a lethargy of mind and body such as she had never known before the previous night. Suzanne, coming in to call her, exclaimed:

“Mam’selle is ill?”

“No. Why should I be ill?”

“Mam’selle looks so strange,” the maid said, regarding her with round and curious eyes. “As if—”

She hesitated.

“Give me my tea,” Domini said.

When she was drinking it she asked:

“Do you know at what time the train leaves Beni-Mora—the passenger train?”

“Yes, Mam’selle. There is only one in the day. It goes soon after twelve. Monsieur Helmuth told me.”

“Oh!”

“What gown will—?”

“Any gown—the white linen one I had on yesterday.”

“Yes, Mam’selle.”

“No, not that. Any other gown. Is it to be hot?”

“Very hot, Mam’selle. There is not a cloud in the sky.”

“How strange!” Domini said, in a low voice that Suzanne did not hear. When she was up and dressed she said:

“I am going out to Count Anteoni’s garden. I think I’ll—yes, I’ll take a book with me.”

She went into her little salon and looked at the volumes scattered about there, some books of devotion, travel, books on sport, Rossetti’s and Newman’s poems, some French novels, and the novels of Jane Austen, of which, oddly, considering her nature, she was very fond. For the first time in her life they struck her as shrivelled, petty chronicles of shrivelled, bloodless, artificial lives. She turned back into her bedroom, took up the little white volume of the Imitation, which lay always near her bed, and went out into the verandah. She looked neither to right nor left, but at once descended the staircase and took her way along the arcade.

When she reached the gate of the garden she hesitated before knocking upon it. The sight of the villa, the arches, the white walls and clustering trees she knew so well hurt her so frightfully, so unexpectedly, that she felt frightened and sick, and as if she must go away quickly to some place which she had never seen, and which could call up no reminiscences in her mind.

Perhaps she would have gone into the oasis, or along the path that skirted the river bed, had not Smain softly opened the gate and come out to meet her, holding a great velvety rose in his slim hand.

He gave it to her without a word, smiling languidly with eyes in which the sun seemed caught and turned to glittering darkness, and as she took it and moved it in her fingers, looking at the wine-coloured petals on which lay tiny drops of water gleaming with thin and silvery lights, she remembered her first visit to the garden, and the mysterious enchantment that had floated out to her through the gate from the golden vistas and the dusky shadows of the trees, the feeling of romantic expectation that had stirred within her as she stepped on to the sand and saw before her the winding ways disappearing into dimness between the rills edged by the pink geraniums.

How long ago that seemed, like a remembrance of early childhood in the heart of one who is old.

Now that the gate was open she resolved to go into the garden. She might as well be there as elsewhere. She stepped in, holding the rose in her hand. One of the drops of water slipped from an outer petal and fell upon the sand. She thought of it as a tear. The rose was weeping, but her eyes were dry. She touched the rose with her lips.

To-day the garden was like a stranger to her, but a stranger with whom she had once—long, long ago—been intimate, whom she had trusted, and by whom she had been betrayed. She looked at it and knew that she had thought it beautiful and loved it. From its recesses had come to her troops of dreams. The leaves of its trees had touched her as with tender hands. The waters of its rills had whispered to her of the hidden things that lie in the breast of joy. The golden rays that played through its scented alleys had played, too, through the shadows of her heart, making a warmth and light there that seemed to come from heaven. She knew this as one knows of the apparent humanity that greeted one’s own humanity in the friend who is a friend no longer, and she sickened at it as at the thought of remembered intimacy with one proved treacherous. There seemed to her nothing ridiculous in this personification of the garden, as there had formerly seemed to her nothing ridiculous in her thought of the desert as a being; but the fact that she did thus instinctively personify the nature that surrounded her gave to the garden in her eyes an aspect that was hostile and even threatening, as if she faced a love now changed to hate, a cold and inimical watchfulness that knew too much about her, to which she had once told all her happy secrets and murmured all her hopes. She did not hate the garden, but she felt as if she feared it. The movements of its leaves conveyed to her uneasiness. The hidden places, which once had been to her retreats peopled with tranquil blessings, were now become ambushes in which lay lurking enemies.

Yet she did not leave it, for to-day something seemed to tell her that it was meant that she should suffer, and she bowed in spirit to the decree.

She went on slowly till she reached the fumoir. She entered it and sat down.

She had not seen any of the gardeners or heard the note of a flute. The day was very still. She looked at the narrow doorway and remembered exactly the attitude in which Count Anteoni had stood during their first interview, holding a trailing branch of the bougainvillea in his hand. She saw him as a shadow that the desert had taken. Glancing down at the carpet sand she imagined the figure of the sand-diviner crouching there and recalled his prophecy, and directly she did this she knew that she had believed in it. She had believed that one day she would ride, out into the desert in a storm, and that with her, enclosed in the curtains of a palanquin, there would be a companion. The Diviner had not told her who would be this companion. Darkness was about him rendering him invisible to the eyes of the seer. But her heart had told her. She had seen the other figure in the palanquin. It was a man. It was Androvsky.

She had believed that she would go out into the desert with Androvsky, with this traveller of whose history, of whose soul, she knew nothing. Some inherent fatalism within her had told her so. And now——?

The darkness of the shade beneath the trees in this inmost recess of the garden fell upon her like the darkness of that storm in which the desert was blotted out, and it was fearful to her because she felt that she must travel in the storm alone. Till now she had been very much alone in life and had realised that such solitude was dreary, that in it development was difficult, and that it checked the steps of the pilgrim who should go upward to the heights of life. But never till now had she felt the fierce tragedy of solitude, the utter terror of it. As she sat in the fumoir, looking down on the smoothly-raked sand, she said to herself that till this moment she had never had any idea of the meaning of solitude. It was the desert within a human soul, but the desert without the sun. And she knew this because at last she loved. The dark and silent flood of passion that lay within her had been released from its boundaries, the old landmarks were swept away for ever, the face of the world was changed.

She loved Androvsky. Everything in her loved him; all that she had been, all that she was, all that she could ever be loved him; that which was physical in her, that which was spiritual, the brain, the heart, the soul, body and flame burning within it—all that made her the wonder that is woman, loved him. She was love for Androvsky. It seemed to her that she was nothing else, had never been anything else. The past years were nothing, the pain by which she was stricken when her mother fled, by which she was tormented when her father died blaspheming, were nothing. There was no room in her for anything but love of Androvsky. At this moment even her love of God seemed to have been expelled from her. Afterwards she remembered that. She did not think of it now. For her there was a universe with but one figure in it—Androvsky. She was unconscious of herself except as love for him. She was unconscious of any Creative Power to whom she owed the fact that he was there to be loved by her. She was passion, and he was that to which passion flowed.

The world was the stream and the sea.

As she sat there with her hands folded on her knees, her eyes bent down, and the purple flowers all about her, she felt simplified and cleansed, as if a mass of little things had been swept from her, leaving space for the great thing that henceforth must for ever dwell within her and dominate her life. The burning shame of which she had been conscious on the previous night, when Androvsky told her of his approaching departure and she was stricken as by a lightning flash, had died away from her utterly. She remembered it with wonder. How should she be ashamed of love? She thought that it would be impossible to her to be ashamed, even if Androvsky knew all that she knew. Just then the immense truth of her feeling conquered everything else, made every other thing seem false, and she said to herself that of truth she did not know how to be ashamed. But with the knowledge of the immense truth of her love came the knowledge of the immense sorrow that might, that must, dwell side by side with it.

Suddenly she moved. She lifted her eyes from the sand and looked out into the garden. Besides this truth within her there was one other thing in the world that was true. Androvsky was going away. While she sat there the moments were passing. They were making the hours that were bent upon destruction. She was sitting in the garden now and Androvsky was close by. A little time would pass noiselessly. She would be sitting there and Androvsky would be far away, gone from the desert, gone out of her life no doubt for ever. And the garden would not have changed. Each tree would stand in its place, each flower would still give forth its scent. The breeze would go on travelling through the lacework of the branches, the streams slipping between the sandy walls of the rills. The inexorable sun would shine, and the desert would whisper in its blue distances of the unseen things that always dwell beyond. And Androvsky would be gone. Their short intercourse, so full of pain, uneasiness, reserve, so fragmentary, so troubled by abrupt violences, by ignorance, by a sense of horror even on the one side, and by an almost constant suspicion on the other, would have come to an end.

She was stunned by the thought, and looked round her as if she expected inanimate Nature to take up arms for her against this fate. Yet she did not for a moment think of taking up arms herself. She had left the hotel without trying to see Androvsky. She did not intend to return to it till he was gone. The idea of seeking him never came into her mind. There is an intensity of feeling that generates action, but there is a greater intensity of feeling that renders action impossible, the feeling that seems to turn a human being into a shell of stone within which burn all the fires of creation. Domini knew that she would not move out of the fumoir till the train was creeping along the river-bed on its way from Beni-Mora.

She had laid down the Imitation upon the seat by her side, and now she took it up. The sight of its familiar pages made her think for the first time, “Do I love God any more?” And immediately afterwards came the thought: “Have I ever loved him?” The knowledge of her love for Androvsky, for this body that she had seen, for this soul that she had seen through the body like a flame through glass, made her believe just then that if she had ever thought—and certainly she had thought—that she loved a being whom she had never seen, never even imaginatively projected, she had deceived herself. The act of faith was not impossible, but the act of love for the object on which that faith was concentrated now seemed to her impossible. For her body, that remained passive, was full of a riot, a fury of life. The flesh that had slept was awakened and knew itself. And she could no longer feel that she could love that which her flesh could not touch, that which could not touch her flesh. And she said to herself, without terror, even without regret, “I do not love, I never have loved, God.”

She looked into the book:

“Unspeakable, indeed, is the sweetness of thy contemplation, which thou bestowest on them that love thee.”

The sweetness of thy contemplation! She remembered Androvsky’s face looking at her out of the heart of the sun as they met for the first time in the blue country. In that moment she put him consciously in the place of God, and there was nothing within her to say, “You are committing mortal sin.”

She looked into the book once more and her eyes fell upon the words which she had read on her first morning in Beni-Mora:

“Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth upwards and securely passeth through all. Whosoever loveth knoweth the cry of this voice.”

She had always loved these words and thought them the most beautiful in the book, but now they came to her with the newness of the first spring morning that ever dawned upon the world. The depth of them was laid bare to her, and, with that depth, the depth of her own heart. The paralysis of anguish passed from her. She no longer looked to Nature as one dumbly seeking help. For they led her to herself, and made her look into herself and her own love and know it. “When frightened it is not disturbed—it securely passeth through all.” That was absolutely true—true as her love. She looked down into her love, and she saw there the face of God, but thought she saw the face of human love only. And it was so beautiful and so strong that even the tears upon it gave her courage, and she said to herself: “Nothing matters, nothing can matter so long as I have this love within me. He is going away, but I am not sad, for I am going with him—my love, all that I am—that is going with him, will always be with him.”

Just then it seemed to her that if she had seen Androvsky lying dead before her on the sand she could not have felt unhappy. Nothing could do harm to a great love. It was the one permanent, eternally vital thing, clad in an armour of fire that no weapon could pierce, free of all terror from outside things because it held its safety within its own heart, everlastingly enough, perfectly, flawlessly complete for and in itself. For that moment fear left her, restlessness left her. Anyone looking in upon her from the garden would have looked in upon a great, calm happiness.

Presently there came a step upon the sand of the garden walks. A man, going slowly, with a sort of passionate reluctance, as if something immensely strong was trying to hold him back, but was conquered with difficulty by something still stronger that drove him on, came out of the fierce sunshine into the shadow of the garden, and began to search its silent recesses. It was Androvsky. He looked bowed and old and guilty. The two lines near his mouth were deep. His lips were working. His thin cheeks had fallen in like the cheeks of a man devoured by a wasting illness, and the strong tinge of sunburn on them seemed to be but an imperfect mark to a pallor that, fully visible, would have been more terrible than that of a corpse. In his eyes there was a fixed expression of ferocious grief that seemed mingled with ferocious anger, as if he were suffering from some dreadful misery, and cursed himself because he suffered, as a man may curse himself for doing a thing that he chooses to do but need not do. Such an expression may sometimes be seen in the eyes of those who are resisting a great temptation.

He began to search the garden, furtively but minutely. Sometimes he hesitated. Sometimes he stood still. Then he turned back and went a little way towards the wide sweep of sand that was bathed in sunlight where the villa stood. Then with more determination, and walking faster, he again made his way through the shadows that slept beneath the densely-growing trees. As he passed between them he several times stretched out trembling hands, broke off branches and threw them on the sand, treading on them heavily and crushing them down below the surface. Once he spoke to himself in a low voice that shook as if with difficulty dominating sobs that were rising in his throat.

“De profundis—” he said. “De profundis—de profundis—”

His voice died away. He took hold of one hand with the other and went on silently.

Presently he made his way at last towards the fumoir in which Domini was still sitting, with one hand resting on the open page whose words had lit up the darkness in her spirit. He came to it so softly that she did not hear his step. He saw her, stood quite still under the trees, and looked at her for a long time. As he did so his face changed till he seemed to become another man. The ferocity of grief and anger faded from his eyes, which were filled with an expression of profound wonder, then of flickering uncertainty, then of hard, manly resolution—a fighting expression that was full of sex and passion. The guilty, furtive look which had been stamped upon all his features, specially upon his lips, vanished. Suddenly he became younger in appearance. His figure straightened itself. His hands ceased from trembling. He moved away from the trees, and went to the doorway of the fumoir.

Domini looked up, saw him, and got up quietly, clasping her fingers round the little book.

Androvsky stood just beyond the doorway, took off his hat, kept it in his hand, and said:

“I came here to say good-bye.”

He made a movement as if to come into the fumoir, but she stopped it by coming at once to the opening. She felt that she could not speak to him enclosed within walls, under a roof. He drew back, and she came out and stood beside him on the sand.

“Did you know I should come?” he said.

She noticed that he had ceased to call her “Madame,” and also that there was in his voice a sound she had not heard in it before, a note of new self-possession that suggested a spirit concentrating itself and aware of its own strength to act.

“No,” she answered.

“Were you coming back to the hotel this morning?” he asked.

“No.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said slowly:

“Then—then you did not wish—you did not mean to see me again before I went?”

“It was not that. I came to the garden—I had to come—I had to be alone.”

“You want to be alone?” he said. “You want to be alone?”

Already the strength was dying out of his voice and face, and the old uneasiness was waking up in him. A dreadful expression of pain came into his eyes.

“Was that why you—you looked so happy?” he said in a harsh, trembling voice.

“When?”

“I stood for a long while looking at you when you were in there”—he pointed to the fumoir—“and your face was happy—your face was happy.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You will be happy alone?—alone in the desert?”

When he said that she felt suddenly the agony of the waterless spaces, the agony of the unpeopled wastes. Her whole spirit shrank and quivered, all the great joy of her love died within her. A moment before she had stood upon the heights of her heart. Now she shrank into its deepest, blackest abysses. She looked at him and said nothing.

“You will not be happy alone.”

His voice no longer trembled. He caught hold of her left hand, awkwardly, nervously, but held it strongly with his close to his side, and went on speaking.

“Nobody is happy alone. Nothing is—men and women—children—animals.” A bird flew across the shadowy space under the trees, followed by another bird; he pointed to them; they disappeared. “The birds, too, they must have companionship. Everything wants a companion.”

“Yes.”

“But then—you will stay here alone in the desert?”

“What else can I do?” she said.

“And that journey,” he went on, still holding her hand fast against his side, “Your journey into the desert—you will take it alone?”

“What else can I do?” she repeated in a lower voice.

It seemed to her that he was deliberately pressing her down into the uttermost darkness.

“You will not go.”

“Yes, I shall go.”

She spoke with conviction. Even in that moment—most of all in that moment—she knew that she would obey the summons of the desert.

“I—I shall never know the desert,” he said. “I thought—it seemed to me that I, too, should go out into it. I have wanted to go. You have made me want to go.”

“I?”

“Yes. Once you said to me that peace must dwell out there. It was on the tower the—the first time you ever spoke to me.”

“I remember.”

“I wondered—I often wonder why you spoke to me.”

She knew he was looking at her with intensity, but she kept her eyes on the sand. There was something in them that she felt he must not see, a light that had just come into them as she realised that already, on the tower before she even knew him, she had loved him. It was that love, already born in her heart but as yet unconscious of its own existence, which had so strangely increased for her the magic of the African evening when she watched it with him. But before—suddenly she knew that she had loved Androvsky from the beginning, from the moment when his face looked at her as if out of the heart of the sun. That was why her entry into the desert had been full of such extraordinary significance. This man and the desert were, had always been, as one in her mind. Never had she thought of the one without the other. Never had she been mysteriously called by the desert without hearing as a far-off echo the voice of Androvsky, or been drawn onward by the mystical summons of the blue distances without being drawn onward, too, by the mystical summons of the heart to which her own responded. The link between the man and the desert was indissoluble. She could not conceive of its being severed, and as she realised this, she realised also something that turned her whole nature into flame.

She could not conceive of Androvsky’s not loving her, of his not having loved her from the moment when he saw her in the sun. To him, too, the desert had made a revelation—the revelation of her face, and of the soul behind it looking through it. In the flames of the sun, as they went into the desert, the flames of their two spirits had been blended. She knew that certainly and for ever. Then how could it be possible that Androvsky should not go out with her into the desert?

“Why did you speak to me?” he said.

“We came into the desert together,” she answered simply. “We had to know each other.”

“And now—now—we have to say——”

His voice ceased. Far away there was the thin sound of a chime. Domini had never before heard the church bell in the garden, and now she felt as if she heard it, not with her ears, but with her spirit. As she heard she felt Androvsky’s hand, which had been hot upon hers, turn cold. He let her hand go, and again she was stricken by the horrible sound she had heard the previous night in the desert, when he turned his horse and rode away with her. And now, as then, he turned away from her in silence, but she knew that this time he was leaving her, that this movement was his final good-bye. With his head bowed down he took a few steps. He was near to a turning of the path. She watched him, knowing that within less than a moment she would be watching only the trees and the sand. She gazed at the bent figure, calling up all her faculties, crying out to herself passionately, desperately, “Remember it—remember it as it is—there—before you—just as it is—for ever.” As it reached the turning, in the distance of the garden rose the twitter of the flute of Larbi. Androvsky stopped, stood still with his back turned towards her. And Larbi, hidden and far off, showered out his little notes of African love, of love in the desert where the sun is everlasting, and the passion of man is hot as the sun, where Liberty reigns, lifting her cymbals that are as spheres of fire, and the footsteps of Freedom are heard upon the sand, treading towards the south.

Larbi played—played on and on, untiring as the love that blossomed with the world, but that will not die when the world dies.

Then Androvsky came back quickly till he reached the place where Domini was standing. He put his hands on her shoulders. Then he sank down on the sand, letting his hands slip down over her breast and along her whole body till they clasped themselves round her knees. He pressed his face into her dress against her knees.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you but don’t listen to me—you mustn’t hear it—you mustn’t. But I must say it. I can’t—I can’t go till I say it. I love you—I love you.”

She heard him sobbing against her knees, and the sound was as the sound of strength made audible. She put her hands against his temples.

“I am listening,” she said. “I must hear it.”

He looked up, rose to his feet, put his hands behind her shoulders, held her, and set his lips on hers, pressing his whole body against hers.

“Hear it!” he said, muttering against her lips. “Hear it. I love you—I love you.”

The two birds they had seen flew back beneath the trees, turned in an airy circle, rose above the trees into the blue sky, and, side by side, winged their way out of the garden to the desert.