Her head was very tired and her temples felt compressed.  She was thankful for the quiet round her.  Any harsh voice would have been intolerable to her just then.  There were many sounds in the village, but they were vague, and mingled, flowing together and composing one sound that was soothing, the restrained and level voice of Life.  It hummed in Domini’s ears as she sipped her tea, and gave an under-side of romance to the peace.  The light that floated in under the round arches of the terrace was subdued.  The sun had just gone down, and the bright colours bloomed no more upon the mountains, which looked like silent monsters that had lost the hue of youth and had suddenly become mysteriously old.  The evening star shone in a sky that still held on its Western border some last pale glimmerings of day, and, at its signal, many dusky wanderers folded their loose garments round them, slung their long guns across their shoulders, and prepared to start on their journey, helped by the cool night wind that blows in the desert when the sun departs.

Domini did not know of them, but she felt the near presence of the desert, and the feeling quieted her nerves.  She was thankful at this moment that she was travelling without any woman friend and was not persecuted by any sense of obligation.  In her fatigue, to rest passive in the midst of quiet, and soft light, calm in the belief, almost the certainty, that this desert village contained no acquaintance to disturb her, was to know all the joy she needed for the moment.  She drank it in dreamily.  Liberty had always been her fetish.  What woman had more liberty than she had, here on this lonely verandah, with the shadowy trees below?

The bell of the church near by chimed softly, and the familiar sound fell strangely upon Domini’s ears out here in Africa, reminding her of many sorrows.  Her religion was linked with terrible memories, with cruel struggles, with hateful scenes of violence.  Lord Rens had been a man of passionate temperament.  Strong in goodness when he had been led by love, he had been equally strong in evil when hate had led him.  Domini had been forced to contemplate at close quarters the raw character of a warped man, from whom circumstance had stripped all tenderness, nearly all reticence.  The terror of truth was known to her.  She had shuddered before it, but she had been obliged to watch it during many years.  In coming to Beni-Mora she had had a sort of vague, and almost childish, feeling that she was putting the broad sea between herself and it.  Yet before she had started it had been buried in the grave.  She never wished to behold such truth again.  She wanted to look upon some other truth of life—­the truth of beauty, of calm, of freedom.  Lord Rens had always been a slave, the slave of love, most of all when he was filled with hatred, and Domini, influenced by his example, instinctively connected love with a chain.  Only the love a human being has for God