up the little dog in his arms, and, holding him, walked to the house door.  In a moment it was opened and he went in.  Then Domini set out towards the garden, avoiding the village street, and taking a byway which skirted the desert.  She walked quickly.  She longed to be within the shadows of the garden behind the white wall.  She did not feel much, think much, as she walked.  Without self-consciously knowing it she was holding all her nature, the whole of herself, fiercely in check.  She did not look about her, did not see the sunlit reaches of the desert, or the walls of the houses of Beni-Mora, or the palm trees.  Only when she had passed the hotel and the negro village and turned to the left, to the track at the edge of which the villa of Count Anteoni stood, did she lift her eyes from the ground.  They rested on the white arcade framing the fierce blue of the cloudless sky.  She stopped short.  Her nature seemed to escape from the leash by which she had held it in with a rush, to leap forward, to be in the garden and in the past, in the past with its passion and its fiery hopes, its magnificent looking forward, its holy desires of joy that would crown her woman’s life, of love that would teach her all the depth, and the height, and the force and the submission of her womanhood.  And then, from that past, it strove on into the present.  The shock was as the shock of battle.  There were noises in her ears, voices clamouring in her heart.  All her pulses throbbed like hammers, and then suddenly she felt as weak as a little sick child, and as if she must lie down there on the dust of the white road in the sunshine, lie down and die at the edge of the desert that had treated her cruelly, that had slain the hopes it had given to her and brought into her heart this terrible despair.

For now she knew a moment of utter despair, in which all things seemed to dissolve into atoms and sink down out of her sight.  She stood quivering in blackness.  She stood absolutely alone, more absolutely alone than any woman had ever been, than any human being had ever been.  She seemed presently, as the blackness faded into something pale, like a ghastly twilight, to see herself—­her wraith, as it were—­standing in a vast landscape, vast as the desert, companionless, lost, forgotten, out of mind, watching for something that would never come, listening for some voice that was hushed in eternal silence.

That was to be her life, she thought—­could she face it?  Could she endure it?  And everything within her said to her that she could not.

And then, just then, when she felt that she must sink down and give up the battle of life, she seemed to see by her side a shape, a little shape like a child.  And it lifted up a hand to her hand.

And she knew that the vast landscape was God’s garden, the Garden of Allah, and that no day, no night could ever pass without God walking in it.

Hearing a knock upon the great gate of the garden Smain uncurled himself on his mat within the tent, rose lazily to his feet, and, without a rose, strolled languidly to open to the visitor.  Domini stood without.  When he saw her he smiled quietly, with no surprise.