“But I never have any real intercourse with him, Madame.  I believe he comes here in search of solitude.  He spends days and even weeks alone shut up in his garden.”

“Thinking,” she said.

The priest looked slightly surprised.

“It would be difficult not to think, Madame, would it not?”

“Oh, yes.  But Count Anteoni thinks rather as a Bashi-Bazouk fights, I fancy.”

She heard a chair creak in the distance and glanced over her shoulder.  The traveller had turned sideways.  At once she bade the priest good-bye and walked away and out through the swing door.

All the afternoon she rested.  The silence was profound.  Beni-Mora was enjoying a siesta in the heat.  Domini revelled in the stillness.  The fatigue of travel had quite gone from her now and she began to feel strangely at home.  Suzanne had arranged photographs, books, flowers in the little salon, had put cushions here and there, and thrown pretty coverings over the sofa and the two low chairs.  The room had an air of cosiness, of occupation.  It was a room one could sit in without restlessness, and Domini liked its simplicity, its bare wooden floor and white walls.  The sun made everything right here.  Without the sun—­but she could not think of Beni-Mora without the sun.

She read on the verandah and dreamed, and the hours slipped quickly away.  No one came to disturb her.  She heard no footsteps, no movements of humanity in the house.  Now and then the sound of voices floated up to her from the gardens, mingling with the peculiar dry noise of palm leaves stirring in a breeze.  Or she heard the distant gallop of horses’ feet.  The church bell chimed the hours and made her recall the previous evening.  Already it seemed far off in the past.  She could scarcely believe that she had not yet spent twenty-four hours in Beni-Mora.  A conviction came to her that she would be there for a long while, that she would strike roots into this sunny place of peace.  When she heard the church bell now she thought of the interior of the church and of the priest with an odd sort of familiar pleasure, as people in England often think of the village church in which they have always been accustomed to worship, and of the clergyman who ministers in it Sunday after Sunday.  Yet at moments she remembered her inward cry in Count Anteoni’s garden, “Oh, what is going to happen to me here?” And then she was dimly conscious that Beni-Mora was the home of many things besides peace.  It held warring influences.  At one moment it lulled her and she was like an infant rocked in a cradle.  At another moment it stirred her, and she was a woman on the edge of mysterious possibilities.  There must be many individualities among the desert spirits of whom Count Anteoni had spoken.  Now one was with her and whispered to her, now another.  She fancied the light touch of their hands on hers, pulling gently at her, as a child pulls you to take you to see a treasure.  And their treasure was surely far away, hidden in the distance of the desert sands.