Domini watched the three riders till they were only specks on the surface of the desert.  Then they became one with it, and were lost in the dreamlike radiance of the morning.  But she did not move.  She sat with her eyes fixed up on the blue horizon.  A great loneliness had entered into her spirit.  Till Count Anteoni had gone she did not realise how much she had become accustomed to his friendship, how near their sympathies had been.  But directly those tiny, moving specks became one with the desert she knew that a gap had opened in her life.  It might be small, but it seemed dark and deep.  For the first time the desert, which she had hitherto regarded as a giver, had taken something from her.  And now, as she sat looking at it, while the sun grew stronger and the light more brilliant, while the mountains gradually assumed a harsher aspect, and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became, as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and terrible aspect of it.  That which has the power to bestow has another power.  She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts of the desert’s hands.  Would she some day, or in the night when the sky was like a sapphire, see the procession of those from whom the desert had taken away perhaps their dreams, perhaps their hopes, perhaps even all that they passionately loved and had desperately clung to?

And in which of the two processions would she walk?

She got up with a sigh.  The garden had become tragic to her for the moment, full of a brooding melancholy.  As she turned to leave it she resolved to go to the priest.  She had never yet entered his house.  Just then she wanted to speak to someone with whom she could be as a little child, to whom she could liberate some part of her spirit simply, certain of a simple, yet not foolish, reception of it by one to whom she could look up.  She desired to be not with the friend so much as with the spiritual director.  Something was alive within her, something of distress, almost of apprehension, which needed the soothing hand, not of human love, but of religion.

When she reached the priest’s house Beni-Mora was astir with a pleasant bustle of life.  The military note pealed through its symphony.  Spahis were galloping along the white roads.  Tirailleurs went by bearing despatches.  Zouaves stood under the palms, staring calmly at the morning, their sunburned hands loosely clasped upon muskets whose butts rested in the sand.  But Domini scarcely noticed the brilliant gaiety of the life about her.  She was preoccupied, even sad.  Yet, as she entered the little garden of the priest, and tapped gently at his door, a sensation of hope sprang up in her heart, born of the sustaining power of her religion.

An Arab boy answered her knock, said that the Father was in and led her at once to a small, plainly-furnished room, with whitewashed walls, and a window opening on to an enclosure at the back, where several large palm trees reared their tufted heads above the smoothly-raked sand.  In a moment the priest came in, smiling with pleasure and holding out his hands in welcome.