And she welcomed the storm.  She even welcomed something else that came to her now in the storm:  the memory of the sand-diviner’s tortured face as he gazed down, reading her fate in the sand.  For what was an untroubled fate?  Surely a life that crept along the hollows and had no impulse to call it to the heights.  Knowing the flawless perfection of her armour she had a wild longing to prove it.  She wished that there should be assaults upon her love, because she knew she could resist them one and all, and she wished to have the keen joy of resisting them.  There is a health of body so keen and vital that it desires combat.  The soul sometimes knows a precisely similar health and is filled with a similar desire.

“Put my love to the proof, O God!” was Domini’s last prayer that night when the storm was at its wildest.  “Put my love to the uttermost proof that he may know it, as he can never know it otherwise.”

And she fell asleep at length, peacefully, in the tumult of the night, feeling that God had heard her prayer.

The dawn came struggling like an exhausted pilgrim through the windy dark, pale and faint, with no courage, it seemed, to grow bravely into day.  As if with the sedulous effort of something weary but of unconquered will, it slowly lit up Beni-Mora with a feeble light that flickered in a cloud of whirling sand, revealing the desolation of an almost featureless void.  The village, the whole oasis, was penetrated by a passionate fog that instead of brooding heavily, phlegmatically, over the face of life and nature travelled like a demented thing bent upon instant destruction, and coming thus cloudily to be more free for crime.  It was an emissary of the desert, propelled with irresistible force from the farthest recess of the dunes, and the desert itself seemed to be hurrying behind it as if to spy upon the doing of its deeds.

As the sea in a great storm rages against the land, ferocious that land should be, so the desert now raged against the oasis that ventured to exist in its bosom.  Every palm tree was the victim of its wrath, every running rill, every habitation of man.  Along the tunnels of mimosa it went like a foaming tide through a cavern, roaring towards the mountains.  It returned and swept about the narrow streets, eddying at the corners, beating upon the palmwood doors, behind which the painted dancing-girls were cowering, cold under their pigments and their heavy jewels, their red hands trembling and clasping one another, clamouring about the minarets of the mosques on which the frightened doves were sheltering, shaking the fences that shut in the gazelles in their pleasaunce, tearing at the great statue of the Cardinal that faced it resolutely, holding up the double cross as if to exorcise it, battering upon the tall, white tower on whose summit Domini had first spoken with Androvsky, raging through the alleys of Count Anteoni’s garden, the arcades of his villa, the window-spaces of the fumoir, from whose walls it tore down frantically the purple petals of the bougainvillea and dashed them, like enemies defeated, upon the quivering paths which were made of its own body.