his quiet existence in this remote place, sunny day succeeding sunny day, each one surely so like its brother that life must become a sort of dream, through which the voice of the church bell called melodiously and the incense rising before the altar shed a drowsy perfume.  How strange it must be really to live in Beni-Mora, to have your house, your work here, your friendships here, your duties here, perhaps here too the tiny section of earth which would hold at the last your body.  It must be strange and monotonous, and yet surely rather sweet, rather safe.

The officers lifted their heads from their plates, the fat man stared, the priest looked quietly up over his napkin, and the Arab waiter slipped forward with attentive haste.  For the swing door of the salle-a-manger at this moment was pushed open, and the traveller—­so Domini called him in her thoughts—­entered and stood looking with hesitation from one table to another.

Domini did not glance up.  She knew who it was and kept her eyes resolutely on her plate.  She heard the Arab speak, a loud noise of stout boots tramping over the wooden floor, and the creak of a chair receiving a surely tired body.  The traveller sat down heavily.  She went on slowly eating the large Robertville fish, which was like something between a trout and a herring.  When she had finished it she gazed straight before her at the cloth, and strove to resume her thoughts of the priest’s life in Beni-Mora.  But she could not.  It seemed to her as if she were back again in Count Anteoni’s garden.  She looked once more through the glasses, and heard the four cries of the Mueddin, and saw the pacing figure in the burning heat, the Arab bent in prayer, the one who watched him, the flight.  And she was indignant with herself for her strange inability to govern her mind.  It seemed to her a pitiful thing of which she should be ashamed.

She heard the waiter set down a plate upon the traveller’s table, and then the noise of a liquid being poured into a glass.  She could not keep her eyes down any more.  Besides, why should she?  Beni-Mora was breeding in her a self-consciousness—­or a too acute consciousness of others—­that was unnatural in her.  She had never been sensitive like this in her former life, but the fierce African sun seemed now to have thawed the ice of her indifference.  She felt everything with almost unpleasant acuteness.  All her senses seemed to her sharpened.  She saw, she heard, as she had never seen and heard till now.  Suddenly she remembered her almost violent prayer—­“Let me be alive!  Let me feel!” and she was aware that such a prayer might have an answer that would be terrible.