Her mind was straying curiously to-day.  Suddenly she found herself thinking of the fanatical religious performance she had seen with Hadj on the night when she had ridden out to watch the moon rise.  She saw in imagination the bowing bodies, the foaming mouths, the glassy eyes of the young priests of the Sahara.  She saw the spikes behind their eyeballs, the struggling scorpions descending into their throats, the flaming coals under their arm-pits, the nails driven into their heads.  She heard them growling as they saw the glass, like hungry beasts at the sight of meat.  And all this was to them religion.  This madness was their conception of worship.  A voice seemed to whisper to her:  “And your madness?”

It was like the voice that whispered to Androvsky in the cemetery of El-Largani, “Come out with me into that world, that beautiful world which God made for men.  Why do you reject it?”

For a moment she saw all religions, all the practices, the renunciations of the religions of the world, as varying forms of madness.  She compared the self-denial of the monk with the fetish worship of the savage.  And a wild thrill of something that was almost like joy rushed through her, the joy that sometimes comes to the unbelievers when they are about to commit some act which they feel would be contrary to God’s will if there were a God.  It was a thrill of almost insolent human emancipation.  The soul cried out:  “I have no master.  When I thought I had a master I was mad.  Now I am sane.”

But it passed almost as it came, like a false thing slinking from the sunlight, and Domini bowed her head in the obscurity of Count Anteoni’s thinking-place and returned to her true self.  That moment had been like the moment upon the tower when she saw below her the Jewess dancing upon the roof for the soldiers, a black speck settling for an instant upon whiteness, then carried away by a purifying wind.  She knew that she would always be subject to such moments so long as she was a human being, that there would always be in her blood something that was self-willed.  Otherwise, would she not be already in Paradise?  She sat and prayed for strength in the battle of life, that could never be anything else but a battle.

At last something within her told her to look up, to look out through the window-space into the garden.  She had not heard a step, but she knew that Androvsky was approaching, and, as she looked up, she prepared herself for a sight that would be terrible.  She remembered his face when he came to bid her good-bye in the garden, and she feared to see his face now.  But she schooled herself to be strong, for herself and for him.