of desert opened
before them, oases crowded with palms, salt lakes and stony ground. They
passed by native towns. They saw the negro gardeners laughing among
the rills of yellow water, or climbing with bare feet the wrinkled tree
trunks to lop away dead branches. They heard tiny goatherds piping,
solitary, in the wastes. Dreams of the mirage rose and faded far off
on the horizon, rose and faded mystically, leaving no trembling trace
behind. And they were silent as the mirage, she in her purpose, he in
his wonder. And the long day waned, and towards evening the camp was
pitched and the evening meal was prepared. And still they could not
speak.

Sometimes Androvsky watched her, and there was a great calm in her face,
but there was no rebuke, no smallness of anger, no hint of despair.
Always he had felt her strength of mind and body, but never so much as
now. Could he rest on it? Dared he? He did not know. And the day seemed
to him to become a dream, and the silence recalled to him the silence of
the monastery in which he had worshipped God before the stranger
came. He thought that in this silence he ought to feel that she was
deliberately raising barriers between them, but--it was strange--he
could not feel this. In her silence there was no bitterness. When is
there bitterness in strength? He rode on and on beside her, and his
sense of a dream deepened, helped by the influence of the desert. Where
were they going? He did not know. What was her purpose? He could not
tell. But he felt that she had a purpose, that her mind was resolved.
Now and then, tearing himself with an effort from the dream, he asked
himself what it could be. What could be in store for him, for them,
after the thing he had told? What could be their mutual life? Must it
not be for ever at an end? Was it not shattered? Was it not dust, like
the dust of the desert that rose round their horses' feet? The silence
did not tell him, and again he ceased from wondering and the dream
closed round him. Were they not travelling in a mirage, mirage people,
unreal, phantomlike, who would presently fade away into the spaces of
the sun? The sand muffled the tread of the horses' feet. The desert
understood their silence, clothed it in a silence more vast and more
impenetrable. And Androvsky had made his effort. He had spoken the truth
at last. He could do no more. He was incapable of any further action. As
Domini felt herself to be in the hands of God, he felt himself