He led the way over the sand, moving silently on his long, brown feet, straight as a reed in a windless place.  Domini followed, holding her breath.  Only sometimes she let her strong imagination play utterly at its will.  She let it go now as she and Smain turned into the golden diapered shadows of the little path and came into the swaying mystery of the trees.  The longing for secrecy, for remoteness, for the beauty of far away had sometimes haunted her, especially in the troubled moments of her life.  Her heart, oppressed, had overleaped the horizon line in answer to a calling from hidden things beyond.  Her emotions had wandered, seeking the great distances in which the dim purple twilight holds surely comfort for those who suffer.  But she had never thought to find any garden of peace that realised her dreams.  Nevertheless, she was already conscious that Smain with his rose was showing her the way to her ideal, that her feet were set upon its pathway, that its legendary trees were closing round her.

Behind the evergreen hedge she heard the liquid bubbling of a hidden waterfall, and when they had left the untempered sunlight behind them this murmur grew louder.  It seemed as if the green gloom in which they walked acted as a sounding-board to the delicious voice.  The little path wound on and on between two running rills of water, which slipped incessantly away under the broad and yellow-tipped leaves of dwarf palms, making a music so faint that it was more like a remembered sound in the mind than one which slid upon the ear.  On either hand towered a jungle of trees brought to this home in the desert from all parts of the world.

There were many unknown to Domini, but she recognised several varieties of palms, acacias, gums, fig trees, chestnuts, poplars, false pepper trees, the huge olive trees called Jamelons, white laurels, indiarubber and cocoanut trees, bananas, bamboos, yuccas, many mimosas and quantities of tall eucalyptus trees.  Thickets of scarlet geranium flamed in the twilight.  The hibiscus lifted languidly its frail and rosy cup, and the red gold oranges gleamed amid leaves that looked as if they had been polished by an attentive fairy.

As she went with Smain farther into the recesses of the garden the voice of the waterfall died away.  No birds were singing.  Domini thought that perhaps they dared not sing lest they might wake the sun from its golden reveries, but afterwards, when she knew the garden better, she often heard them twittering with a subdued, yet happy, languor, as if joining in a nocturn upon the edge of sleep.  Under the trees the sand was yellow, of a shade so voluptuously beautiful that she longed to touch it with her bare feet like Smain.  Here and there it rose in symmetrical little pyramids, which hinted at absent gardeners, perhaps enjoying a siesta.