“Return!” he said.  “What do you mean?”

She saw the expression of almost angry fear in his face.  It warned her not to give the reins to her natural impulse, which was always towards a great frankness.

“Boris, you fled from God, but do you not think it possible that you could ever return to Him?  Have you not taken the first step?  Have you not prayed?” His face changed, grew slightly calmer.

“You told me I could pray,” he answered, almost like a child.  “Otherwise I—­I should not have dared to.  I should have felt that I was insulting God.”

“If you trusted me in such a thing, can you not trust me now?”

“But”—­he said uneasily—­“but this is different, a worldly matter, a matter of daily life.  I shall have to know.”

“Yes.”

“Then why should I not know now?  At any moment I could ask Batouch.”

“Batouch only knows from day to day.  I have a map of the desert.  I got it before we left Beni-Mora.”

Something—­perhaps a very slight hesitation in her voice just before she said the last words—­startled him.  He turned on his horse and looked at her hard.

“Domini,” he said, “are we—­we are not going back to Beni-Mora?”

“I will tell you to-night,” she replied in a low voice.  “Let me tell you tonight.”

He said no more, but he gazed at her for a long time as if striving passionately to read her thoughts.  But he could not.  Her white face was calm, and she rode looking straight before her, as one that looked towards some distant goal to which all her soul was journeying with her body.  There was something mystical in her face, in that straight, far-seeing glance, that surely pierced beyond the blue horizon line and reached a faroff world.  What world?  He asked himself the question, but no answer came, and he dropped his eyes.  A new and horrible sadness came to him, a new sensation of separation from Domini.  She had set their bodies apart, and he had yielded.  Now, was she not setting something else apart?  For, in spite of all, in spite of his treacherous existence with her, he had so deeply and entirely loved her that he had sometimes felt, dared to feel, that in their passion in the desert their souls had been fused together.  His was black—­he knew it—­and hers was white.  But had not the fire and the depth of their love conquered all differences, made even their souls one as their bodies had been one?  And now was she not silently, subtly, withdrawing her soul from his?  A sensation of acute despair swept over him, of utter impotence.

“Domini!” he said, “Domini!”

“Yes,” she answered.

And this time she withdrew her eyes from the blue distance and looked at him.

“Domini, you must trust me.”

He was thinking of the two tents set the one apart from the other.