“To-night I like to look at fire,” she answered.

“Tell me why.”

“It is as if I looked at you, at all that there is in you that you have never said, never been able to say to me, all that you never can say to me but that I know all the same.”

“But,” he said, “that fire is——­”

He did not finish the sentence, but put up his hand and turned her face till she was looking, not at the fire, but at him.

“It is not like me,” he said.  “Men made it, and—­it’s a fire that can sink into ashes.”

An expression of sudden exaltation shone in her eyes.

“And God made you,” she said.  “And put into you the spark that is eternal.”

And now again she thought, she dared, she loved to think of the crucifix and of the moment when he would see it in the tent.

“And God made you love me,” she said.  “What is it?”

Androvsky had moved suddenly, as if he were going to get up from the warm ground.

“Did you—?”

“No,” he said in a low voice.  “Go on, Domini.  Speak to me.”

He sat still.

A sudden longing came to her to know if to-night he were feeling as she was the sacredness of their relation to each other.  Never had they spoken intimately of religion or of the mysteries that lie beyond and around human life.  Once or twice, when she had been about to open her heart to him, to let him understand her deep sense of the things unseen, something had checked her, something in him.  It was as if he had divined her intention and had subtly turned her from it, without speech, merely by the force of his inward determination that she should not break through his reserve.  But to-night, with his hand on hers and the starry darkness above them, with the waste stretching around them, and the cool air that was like the breath of liberty upon their faces, she was unconscious of any secret, combative force in him.  It was impossible to her to think there could have been any combat, however inward, however subtle, between them.  Surely if it were ever permitted to two natures to be in perfect accord theirs were in perfect accord to-night.

“I never felt the presence of God in His world so keenly as I feel it to-night,” she went on, drawing a little closer to him.  “Even in the church to-day He seemed farther away than tonight.  But somehow—­one has these thoughts without knowing why—­I have always believed that the farther I went into the desert the nearer I should come to God.”

Androvsky moved again.  The clasp of his hand on hers loosened, but he did not take his hand away.

“Why should—­what should make you think that?” he asked slowly.

“Don’t you know what the Arabs call the desert?”

“No.  What do they call it?”

“The Garden of Allah.”

“The Garden of Allah!” he repeated.

There was a sound like fear in his voice.  Even her great joy did not prevent her from noticing it, and she remembered, with a thrill of pain, where and under what circumstances she had first heard the Arab’s name for the desert.