Few of the French population had ventured out, and the church itself was almost deserted when the hour for the wedding drew nigh.

The priest came from his little house, bending forward against the wind, his eyes partially protected from the driving sand by blue spectacles.  His face, which was habitually grave, to-day looked sad and stern, like the face of a man about to perform a task that was against his inclination, even perhaps against his conscience.  He glanced at the waiting Arabs and hastened into the church, taking off his spectacles as he did so, and wiping his eyes, which were red from the action of the sand-grains, with a silk pocket-handkerchief.  When he reached the sacristy he shut himself into it alone for a moment.  He sat down on a chair and, leaning his arms upon the wooden table that stood in the centre of the room, bent forward and stared before him at the wall opposite, listening to the howling of the wind.

Father Roubier had an almost passionate affection for his little church of Beni-Mora.  So long and ardently had he prayed and taught in it, so often had he passed the twilight hours in it alone wrapped in religious reveries, or searching his conscience for the shadows of sinful thoughts, that it had become to him as a friend, and more than a friend.  He thought of it sometimes as his confessor and sometimes as his child.  Its stones were to him as flesh and blood, its altars as lips that whispered consolation in answer to his prayers.  The figures of its saints were heavenly companions.  In its ugliness he perceived only beauty, in its tawdriness only the graces that are sweet offerings to God.  The love that, had he not been a priest, he might have given to a woman he poured forth upon his church, and with it that other love which, had it been the design of his Heavenly Father, would have fitted him for the ascetic, yet impassioned, life of an ardent and devoted monk.  To defend this consecrated building against outrage he would, without hesitation, have given his last drop of blood.  And now he was to perform in it an act against which his whole nature revolted; he was to join indissolubly the lives of these two strangers who had come to Beni-Mora—­Domini Enfilden and Boris Androvsky.  He was to put on the surplice and white stole, to say the solemn and irreparable “Ego Jungo,” to sprinkle the ring with holy water and bless it.

As he sat there alone, listening to the howling of the storm outside, he went mentally through the coming ceremony.  He thought of the wonderful grace and beauty of the prayers of benediction, and it seemed to him that to pronounce them with his lips, while his nature revolted against his own utterance, was to perform a shameful act, was to offer an insult to this little church he loved.

Yet how could he help performing this act?  He knew that he would do it.  Within a few minutes he would be standing before the altar, he would be looking into the faces of this man and woman whose love he was called upon to consecrate.  He would consecrate it, and they would go out from him into the desert man and wife.  They would be lost to his sight in the town.