“What is that song?” she asked under her breath.  “Surely I must have heard it!”

“You don’t know?”

“Wait!”

She searched her heart.  It seemed to her that she knew the song.  At some period of her life she had certainly been deeply moved by it—­but when? where?  The voice died away, and was succeeded by a soft chorus singing monotonously: 

“Wurra-Wurra.”

Then it rose once more in a dreamy and reticent refrain, like the voice of a soul communing with itself in the desert, above the instruments and the murmuring chorus.

“You remember?” whispered the Count.

She moved her head in assent but did not speak.  She could not speak.  It was the song the Arab had sung as he turned into the shadow of the palm trees, the song of the freed negroes of Touggourt: 

     “No one but God and I
     Knows what is in my heart.”

The priest leaned back in his chair.  His dark eyes were cast down, and his thin, sun-browned hands were folded together in a way that suggested prayer.  Did this desert song of the black men, children of God like him as their song affirmed, stir his soul to some grave petition that embraced the wants of all humanity?

Androvsky was sitting quite still.  He was also looking down and the lids covered his eyes.  An expression of pain still lingered on his face, but it was less cruel, no longer tortured, but melancholy.  And Domini, as she listened, recalled the strange cry that had risen within her as the Arab disappeared in the sunshine, the cry of the soul in life surrounded by mysteries, by the hands, the footfalls, the voices of hidden things—­“What is going to happen to me here?” But that cry had risen in her, found words in her, only when confronted by the desert.  Before it had been perhaps hidden in the womb.  Only then was it born.  And now the days had passed and the nights, and the song brought with it the cry once more, the cry and suddenly something else, another voice that, very far away, seemed to be making answer to it.  That answer she could not hear.  The words of it were hidden in the womb as, once, the words of her intense question.  Only she felt that an answer had been made.  The future knew, and had begun to try to tell her.  She was on the very edge of knowledge while she listened, but she could not step into the marvellous land.

Presently Count Anteoni spoke to the priest.

“You have heard this song, no doubt, Father?”

Father Roubier shook his head.

“I don’t think so, but I can never remember the Arab music”

“Perhaps you dislike it?”

“No, no.  It is ugly in a way, but there seems a great deal of meaning in it.  In this song especially there is—­one might almost call it beauty.”

“Wonderful beauty,” Domini said in a low voice, still listening to the song.

“The words are beautiful,” said the Count, this time addressing himself to Androvsky.  “I don’t know them all, but they begin like this: