“Irena!  But—­”

“She could not live shut up in a room.  She could not wear the veil for Hadj.”

“But then—?”

“She has divorced him, Madame.  It is easy here.  For a few francs one can—­”

The whistle sounded.  The train jerked.  Batouch seized her hand, seized Androvsky’s, sprang back to the platform.

“Good-bye, Batouch!  Good-bye, Ouardi!  Good-bye, Smain!”

The train moved on.  As it reached the end of the platform Domini saw an emaciated figure standing there alone, a thin face with glittering eyes turned towards her with a glaring scrutiny.  It was the sand-diviner.  He smiled at her, and his smile contracted the wound upon his face, making it look wicked and grotesque like the face of a demon.  She sank down on the seat.  For a moment, a hideous moment, she felt as if he personified Beni-Mora, as if this smile were Beni-Mora’s farewell to her and to Androvsky.

And Irena was dancing at Onargla, far away in the desert.

She remembered the night in the dancing-house, Irena’s attack upon Hadj.

That love of Africa was at an end.  Was not everything at an end?  Yet Larbi still played upon his flute in the garden of Count Anteoni, still played the little tune that was as the leit motif of the eternal renewal of life.  And within herself she carried God’s mystery of renewal, even she, with her numbed mind, her tired heart.  She, too, was to help to carry forward the banner of life.

She had come to Beni-Mora in the sunset, and now, in the sunset, she was leaving it.  But she did not lean from the carriage window to watch the pageant that was flaming in the west.  Instead, she shut her eyes and remembered it as it was on that evening when they, who now were journeying away from the desert together, had been journeying towards it together.  Strangers who had never spoken to each other.  And the evening came, and the train stole into the gorge of El-Akbara, and still she kept her eyes closed.  Only when the desert was finally left behind, divided from them by the great wall of rock, did she look up and speak to Androvsky.

“We met here, Boris,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, “at the gate of the desert.  I shall never be here again.”

Soon the night fell around them.

* * * * *

In the evening of the following day they reached Tunis, and drove to the Hotel d’Orient, where they had written to engage rooms for one night.  They had expected that the city would be almost deserted by its European inhabitants now the summer had set in, but when they drove up to the door of the hotel the proprietor came out to inform them that, owing to the arrival of a ship full of American tourists who, personally conducted, were “viewing” Tunis after an excursion to the East and to the Holy Land, he had been unable to keep for them a private sitting-room.  With many apologies he explained that all the sitting-rooms in the house had been turned into bedrooms, but only for one night.  On the morrow the personally-conducted ones would depart and Madame and Monsieur could have a charming salon.  They listened silently to his explanations and apologies, standing in the narrow entrance hall, which was blocked up with piles of luggage.  “Tomorrow,” he kept on repeating, “to-morrow” all would be different.