here they will! Why was I born to live in the sand and to
be alone?"

He was moved by envy. But then he remembered his intercourse with
Androvsky on the previous day.

"After all," he thought more comfortably, "he did not look a happy man!"
And he took himself to task for his sin of envy, and strolled to the inn
by the fountain where he paid his pension.

The same day, in the house of the marabout of Beni-Hassan, Count Anteoni
received a letter brought from Amara by an Arab. It was as follows:

"AMARA.

"MY DEAR FRIEND: Good-bye. We are just leaving. I had expected to be
here longer, but we must go. We are returning to the north and shall
not penetrate farther into the desert. I shall think of you, and of your
journey on among the people of your faith. You said to me, when we sat
in the tent door, that now you could pray in the desert. Pray in the
desert for us. And one thing more. If you never return to Beni-Mora, and
your garden is to pass into other hands, don't let it go into the hands
of a stranger. I could not bear that. Let it come to me. At any price
you name. Forgive me for writing thus. Perhaps you will return, or
perhaps, even if you do not, you will keep your garden.--Your Friend,
DOMINI."

In a postscript was an address which would always find her.

Count Anteoni read this letter two or three times carefully, with a
grave face.

"Why did she not put Domini Androvsky?" he said to himself. He locked
the letter in a drawer. All that night he was haunted by thoughts of
the garden. Again and again it seemed to him that he stood with Domini
beside the white wall and saw, in the burning distance of the desert, at
the call of the Mueddin, the Arabs bowing themselves in prayer, and
the man--the man to whom now she had bound herself by the most holy
tie--fleeing from prayer as if in horror.

"But it was written," he murmured to himself. "It was written in the
sand and in fire: 'The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.'"

In the dawn when, turning towards the rising sun, he prayed, he
remembered Domini and her words: "Pray in the desert for us." And in the
Garden of Allah he prayed to Allah for her, and for Androvsky.

Meanwhile the camp had been struck, and the first stage of the journey
northward, the journey back, had been accomplished. Domini had given the
order of departure, but she had first spoken with Androvsky.

After his narrative, and her words that followed it, he did not come