She caught herself up at this last thought.  She—­thinking naturally that life was full of radiant wonder!  Was she then so utterly transformed already by Beni-Mora?  Or had the thought come to her because she stood side by side with someone whose sorrows had been unfathomably deeper than her own, and so who, all unconsciously, gave her a knowledge of her own—­till then unsuspected—­hopefulness?

She looked at her companion again.  He seemed to have relinquished his intention of leaving her, and was standing quietly beside her, staring towards the desert, with his head slightly drooped forward.  In one hand he held a thick stick.  He had put his hat on again.  His attitude was much calmer than it had been.  Already he seemed more at ease with her.  She was glad of that.  She did not ask herself why.  But the intense beauty of evening in this land and at this height made her wish enthusiastically that it could produce a happiness such as it created in her in everyone.  Such beauty, with its voices, its colours, its lines of tree and leaf, of wall and mountain ridge, its mystery of shapes and movements, stillness and dreaming distance, its atmosphere of the far off come near, chastened by journeying, fine with the unfamiliar, its solemn changes towards the impenetrable night, was too large a thing and fraught with too much tender and lovable invention to be worshipped in any selfishness.  It made her feel as if she could gladly be a martyr for unseen human beings, as if sacrifice would be an easy thing if made for those to whom such beauty would appeal.  Brotherhood rose up and cried in her, as it surely sang in the sunset, in the mountains, the palm groves and the desert.  The flame above the hills, their purple outline, the moving, feathery trees; dark under the rose-coloured glory of the west, and most of all the immeasurably remote horizons, each moment more strange and more eternal, made her long to make this harsh stranger happy.

“One ought to find happiness here,” she said to him very simply.

She saw his hand strain itself round the wood of his stick.

“Why?” he said.

He turned right round to her and looked at her with a sort of anger.

“Why should you suppose so?” he added, speaking quite quickly, and without his former uneasiness and consciousness.

“Because it is so beautiful and so calm.”

“Calm!” he said.  “Here!”

There was a sound of passionate surprise in his voice.  Domini was startled.  She felt as if she were fighting, and must fight hard if she were not to be beaten to the dust.  But when she looked at him she could find no weapons.  She said nothing.  In a moment he spoke again.

“You find calm here,” he said slowly.  “Yes, I see.”

His head dropped lower and his face hardened as he looked over the edge of the parapet to the village, the blue desert.  Then he lifted his eyes to the mountains and the clear sky and the shadowy moon.  Each element in the evening scene was examined with a fierce, painful scrutiny, as if he was resolved to wring from each its secret.