Yet she did not leave it, for to-day something seemed to tell her that it was meant that she should suffer, and she bowed in spirit to the decree.

She went on slowly till she reached the fumoir.  She entered it and sat down.

She had not seen any of the gardeners or heard the note of a flute.  The day was very still.  She looked at the narrow doorway and remembered exactly the attitude in which Count Anteoni had stood during their first interview, holding a trailing branch of the bougainvillea in his hand.  She saw him as a shadow that the desert had taken.  Glancing down at the carpet sand she imagined the figure of the sand-diviner crouching there and recalled his prophecy, and directly she did this she knew that she had believed in it.  She had believed that one day she would ride, out into the desert in a storm, and that with her, enclosed in the curtains of a palanquin, there would be a companion.  The Diviner had not told her who would be this companion.  Darkness was about him rendering him invisible to the eyes of the seer.  But her heart had told her.  She had seen the other figure in the palanquin.  It was a man.  It was Androvsky.

She had believed that she would go out into the desert with Androvsky, with this traveller of whose history, of whose soul, she knew nothing.  Some inherent fatalism within her had told her so.  And now——?

The darkness of the shade beneath the trees in this inmost recess of the garden fell upon her like the darkness of that storm in which the desert was blotted out, and it was fearful to her because she felt that she must travel in the storm alone.  Till now she had been very much alone in life and had realised that such solitude was dreary, that in it development was difficult, and that it checked the steps of the pilgrim who should go upward to the heights of life.  But never till now had she felt the fierce tragedy of solitude, the utter terror of it.  As she sat in the fumoir, looking down on the smoothly-raked sand, she said to herself that till this moment she had never had any idea of the meaning of solitude.  It was the desert within a human soul, but the desert without the sun.  And she knew this because at last she loved.  The dark and silent flood of passion that lay within her had been released from its boundaries, the old landmarks were swept away for ever, the face of the world was changed.

She loved Androvsky.  Everything in her loved him; all that she had been, all that she was, all that she could ever be loved him; that which was physical in her, that which was spiritual, the brain, the heart, the soul, body and flame burning within it—­all that made her the wonder that is woman, loved him.  She was love for Androvsky.  It seemed to her that she was nothing else, had never been anything else.  The past years were nothing, the pain by which she was stricken when her mother fled, by which she was tormented when her father died blaspheming,