He had destroyed that past himself.  But for him it might have been also the present, the future.  It might have lasted for years, perhaps till death took him or Domini.  Why not?  He had only had to keep silence, to insist on remaining in the desert, far from the busy ways of men.  They could have lived as certain others lived, who loved the free, the solitary life, in an oasis of their own, tending their gardens of palms.  Life would have gone like a sunlit dream.  And death?  At that thought he shuddered.  Death—­what would that have been to him?  What would it be now when it came?  He put the thought from him with force, as a man thrusts away from him the filthy hand of a clamouring stranger assailing him in the street.

This evening he had no time to think of death.  Life was enough, life with this terror which he had deliberately placed in it.

He thought of himself as a madman for having spoken to Domini.  He cursed himself as a madman.  For he knew, although he strove furiously not to know, how irrevocable was his act, in consequence of the great strength of her nature.  He knew that though she had been to him a woman of fire she might be to him a woman of iron—­even to him whom she loved.

How she had loved him!

He walked faster before the tents, to and fro.

How she had loved him!  How she loved him still, at this moment after she knew what he was, what he had done to her.  He had no doubt of her love as he walked there.  He felt it, like a tender hand upon him.  But that hand was inflexible too.  In its softness there was firmness—­firmness that would never yield to any strength in him.

Those two tents told him the story of her strength.  As he looked at them he was looking into her soul.  And her soul was in direct conflict with his.  That was what he felt.  She had thought, she had made up her mind.  Quietly, silently she had acted.  By that action, without a word, she had spoken to him, told him a tremendous thing.  And the man—­the passionate man who had left the monastery—­loose in him now was aflame with an impotent desire that was like a heat of fury against her, while the monk, hidden far down in him, was secretly worshipping her cleanliness of spirit.

But the man who had left the monastery was in the ascendant in him, and at last drove him to a determination that the monk secretly knew to be utterly vain.  He made up his mind to enter into conflict with Domini’s strength.  He felt that he must, that he could not quietly, without a word, accept this sudden new life of separation symbolised for him by the two tents standing apart.

He stood still.  In the distance, under the palms, he saw Batouch laughing with Ouardi.  Near them Ali was reposing on a mat, moving his head from side to side, smiling with half-shut, vacant eyes, and singing a languid song.

This music maddened him.

“Batouch!” he called out sharply.  “Batouch!”