“Water!”

Androvsky’s voice spoke as if startled.  Domini pulled up.  Their horses stood side by side, and at once, with the cessation of motion, the mysticism of the desert came upon them and the marvel of its silence, and they seemed to be set there in a wonderful dream, themselves and their horses dreamlike.

“Water!” he said again.

He pointed, and along the right-hand edge of the oasis Domini saw grey, calm waters.  The palms ran out into them and were bathed by them softly.  And on their bosom here and there rose small, dim islets.  Yes, there was water, and yet—­The mystery of it was a mystery she had never known to brood even over a white northern sea in a twilight hour of winter, was deeper than the mystery of the Venetian laguna morta, when the Angelus bell chimes at sunset, and each distant boat, each bending rower and patient fisherman, becomes a marvel, an eerie thing in the gold.

“Is it mirage?” she said to him almost in a whisper.

And suddenly she shivered.

“Yes, it is, it must be.”

He did not answer.  His left hand, holding the rein, dropped down on the saddle peak, and he stared across the waste, leaning forward and moving his lips.  She looked at him and forgot even the mirage in a sudden longing to understand exactly what he was feeling.  His mystery—­the mystery of that which is human and is forever stretching out its arms—­was as the fluid mystery of the mirage, and seemed to blend at that moment with the mystery she knew lay in herself.  The mirage was within them as it was far off before them in the desert, still, grey, full surely of indistinct movement, and even perhaps of sound they could not hear.

At last he turned and looked at her.

“Yes, it must be mirage,” he said.  “The nothing that seems to be so much.  A man comes out into the desert and he finds there mirage.  He travels right out and that’s what he reaches—­or at least he can’t reach it, but just sees it far away.  And that’s all.  And is that what a man finds when he comes out into the world?”

It was the first time he had spoken without any trace of reserve to her, for even on the tower, though there had been tumult in his voice and a fierceness of some strange passion in his words, there had been struggle in his manner, as if the pressure of feeling forced him to speak in despite of something which bade him keep silence.  Now he spoke as if to someone whom he knew and with whom he had talked of many things.

“But you ought to know better than I do,” she answered.

“I!”

“Yes.  You are a man, and have been in the world, and must know what it has to give—­whether there’s only mirage, or something that can be grasped and felt and lived in, and——­”

“Yes, I’m a man and I ought to know,” he replied.  “Well, I don’t know, but I mean to know.”

There was a savage sound in his voice.