It was plain from their manner to each other that their former slight acquaintance had moved towards something like a pleasant friendship.

Domini looked as if she were no longer a wonder-stricken sight-seer in this marvellous garden of the sun, but as if she had become familiar with it.  Yet her wonder was not gone.  It was only different.  There was less sheer amazement, more affection in it.  As she had said, she had not become accustomed to the magic of Africa.  Its strangeness, its contrasts still startled and moved her.  But she began to feel as if she belonged to Beni-Mora, as if Beni-Mora would perhaps miss her a little if she went away.

Ten days had passed since the ride to Sidi-Zerzour—­days rather like a dream to Domini.

What she had sought in coming to Beni-Mora she was surely finding.  Her act was bringing forth its fruit.  She had put a gulf, in which rolled the sea, between the land of the old life and the land in which at least the new life was to begin.  The completeness of the severance had acted upon her like a blow that does not stun, but wakens.  The days went like a dream, but in the dream there was the stir of birth.  Her lassitude was permanently gone.  There had been no returning after the first hours of excitement.  The frost that had numbed her senses had utterly melted away.  Who could be frost-bound in this land of fire?  She had longed for peace and she was surely finding it, but it was a peace without stagnation.  Hope dwelt in it, and expectancy, vague but persistent.  As to forgetfulness, sometimes she woke from the dream and was almost dazed, almost ashamed to think how much she was forgetting, and how quickly.  Her European life and friends—­some of them intimate and close—­were like a far-off cloud on the horizon, flying still farther before a steady wind that set from her to it.  Soon it would disappear, would be as if it had never been.  Now and then, with a sort of fierce obstinacy, she tried to stay the flight she had desired, and desired still.  She said to herself, “I will remember.  It’s contemptible to forget like this.  It’s weak to be able to.”  Then she looked at the mountains or the desert, at two Arabs playing the ladies’ game under the shadow of a cafe wall, or at a girl in dusty orange filling a goatskin pitcher at a well beneath a palm tree, and she succumbed to the lulling influence, smiling as they smile who hear the gentle ripple of the waters of Lethe.

She heard them perhaps most clearly when she wandered in Count Anteoni’s garden.  He had made her free of it in their first interview.  She had ventured to take him at his word, knowing that if he repented she would divine it.  He had made her feel that he had not repented.  Sometimes she did not see him as she threaded the sandy alleys between the little rills, hearing the distant song of Larbi’s amorous flute, or sat in the dense shade of the trees watching through a window-space of quivering golden