Incomparably more wonderful than what she had waited for seemed to her now this sudden falling of the storm, this mystical voice that came to them out of the heart of the sands telling them that they were passing at last into the arms of the Sahara.  The wind sank rapidly.  The light grew in the palanquin.  From without the voices of the camel-drivers and of Batouch and Ali talking together reached their ears distinctly.  Yet they remained silent.  It seemed as if they feared by speech to break the spell of the calm that was flowing around them, as if they feared to interrupt the murmur of the desert.  Domini now returned the gaze of her husband.  She could not take her eyes from his, for she wished him to read all the joy that was in her heart; she wished him to penetrate her thoughts, to understand her desires, to be at one with the woman who had been born on the eve of the passing of the wind.  With the coming of this mystic calm was coming surely something else.  The silence was bringing with it the fusing of two natures.  The desert in this moment was drawing together two souls into a union which Time and Death would have no power to destroy.  Presently the wind completely died away, only a faint breeze fluttered the curtains of the palanquin, and the light that penetrated between them here and there was no longer white, but sparkled with a tiny dust of gold.  Then Androvsky moved to open the curtains, and Domini spoke for the first time since their marriage.

“Wait,” she said in a low voice.

He dropped his hand obediently, and looked at her with inquiry in his eyes.

“Don’t let us look till we are far out,” she said, “far away from Beni-Mora.”

He made no answer, but she saw that he understood all that was in her heart.  He leaned a little nearer to her and stretched out his arm as if to put it round her.  But he did not put it round her, and she knew why.  He was husbanding his great joy as she had husbanded the dark hours of the previous night that to her were golden.  And that unfinished action, that impulse unfulfilled, showed her more clearly the depths of his passion for her even than had the desperate clasp of his hands about her knees in the garden.  That which he did not do now was the greatest assertion possible of all that he would do in the life that was before them, and made her feel how entirely she belonged to him.  Something within her trembled like a poor child before whom is suddenly set the prospect of a day of perfect happiness.  She thought of the ending of this day, of the coming of the evening.  Always the darkness had parted them; at the ending of this day it would unite them.  In Androvsky’s eyes she read her thought of the darkness reflected, reflected and yet changed, transmuted by sex.  It was as if at that moment she read the same story written in two ways—­by a woman and by a man, as if she saw Eden, not only as Eve saw it, but as Adam.

A long time passed, but they did not feel it to be long.  When their camel halted they unclasped their hands slowly like sleepers reluctantly awaking.