Could it be that this man she loved was secretly afraid of something in the desert, some influence, some—?  Her thought stopped short, like a thing confused.

“Don’t you think it a very beautiful name?” she asked, with an almost fierce longing to be reassured, to be made to know that he, like her, loved the thought that God was specially near to those who travelled in this land of solitude.

“Is it beautiful?”

“To me it is.  It makes me feel as if in the desert I were specially watched over and protected, even as if I were specially loved there.”

Suddenly Androvsky put his arm round her and strained her to him.

“By me!  By me!” he said.  “Think of me to-night, only of me, as I think only of you.”

He spoke as if he were jealous even of her thought of God, as if he did not understand that it was the very intensity of her love for him that made her, even in the midst of the passion of the body, connect their love of each other with God’s love of them.  In her heart this overpowering human love which, in the garden, when first she realised it fully, had seemed to leave no room in her for love of God, now in the moment when it was close to absolute satisfaction seemed almost to be one with her love of God.  Perhaps no man could understand how, in a good woman, the two streams of the human love which implies the intense desire of the flesh, and the mystical love which is absolutely purged of that desire, can flow the one into the other and mingle their waters.  She tried to think that, and then she ceased to try.  Everything was forgotten as his arms held her fast in the night, everything except this great force of human love which was like iron, and yet soft about her, which was giving and wanting, which was concentrated upon her to the exclusion of all else, plunging the universe in darkness and setting her in light.

“There is nothing for me to-night but you,” he said, crushing her in his arms.  “The desert is your garden.  To me it has always been your garden, only that, put here for you, and for me because you love me—­but for me only because of that.”

The Arabs’ fire was rapidly dying down.

“When it goes out, when it goes out!” Androvsky whispered it her ear.

His breath stirred the thick tresses of her hair.

“Let us watch it!” he whispered.

She pressed his hand but did not reply.  She could not speak any more.  At last the something wild and lawless, the something that was more than passionate, that was hot and even savage in her nature, had risen up in its full force to face a similar force in him, which insistently called it and which it answered without shame.

“It is dying,” Androvsky said.  “It is dying.  Look how small the circle of the flame is, how the darkness is creeping up about it!  Domini—­do you see?”

She pressed his hand again.

“Do you long for the darkness?” he asked.  “Do you, Domini?  The desert is sending it.  The desert is sending it for you, and for me because you love me.”