“I should like to know, too,” Domini said quietly.  “And I feel as if it was the desert that was going to teach me.”

“The desert—­how?”

“I don’t know.”

He pointed again to the mirage.

“But that’s what there is in the desert.”

“That—­and what else?”

“Is there anything else?”

“Perhaps everything,” she answered.  “I am like you.  I want to know.”

He looked straight into her eyes and there was something dominating in his expression.

“You think it is the desert that could teach you whether the world holds anything but a mirage,” he said slowly.  “Well, I don’t think it would be the desert that could teach me.”

She said nothing more, but let her horse go and rode off.  He followed, and as he rode awkwardly, yet bravely, pressing his strong legs against his animal’s flanks and holding his thin body bent forward, he looked at Domini’s upright figure and brilliant, elastic grace—­that gave in to her horse as wave gives to wind—­with a passion of envy in his eyes.

They did not speak again till the great palm gardens of the oasis they had seen far off were close upon them.  From the desert they looked both shabby and superb, as if some millionaire had poured forth money to create a Paradise out here, and, when it was nearly finished, had suddenly repented of his whim and refused to spend another farthing.  The thousands upon thousands of mighty trees were bounded by long, irregular walls of hard earth, at the top of which were stuck distraught thorn bushes.  These walls gave the rough, penurious aspect which was in such sharp contrast to the exotic mystery they guarded.  Yet in the fierce blaze of the sun their meanness was not disagreeable.  Domini even liked it.  It seemed to her as if the desert had thrown up waves to protect this daring oasis which ventured to fling its green glory like a defiance in the face of the Sahara.  A wide track of earth, sprinkled with stones and covered with deep ruts, holes and hummocks, wound in from the desert between the earthen walls and vanished into the heart of the oasis.  They followed it.

Domini was filled with a sort of romantic curiosity.  This luxury of palms far out in the midst of desolation, untended apparently by human hands—­for no figures moved among them, there was no one on the road—­suggested some hidden purpose and activity, some concealed personage, perhaps an Eastern Anteoni, whose lair lay surely somewhere beyond them.  As she had felt the call of the desert she now felt the call of the oasis.  In this land thrilled eternally a summons to go onward, to seek, to penetrate, to be a passionate pilgrim.  She wondered whether her companion’s heart could hear it.

“I don’t know why it is,” she said, “but out here I always feel expectant.  I always feel as if some marvellous thing might be going to happen to me.”

She did not add “Do you?” but looked at him as if for a reply.