s sound warned her not to
try his strength or hers.

"Come, Boris," she said, and her voice held none of the passionate
regret that was in her heart, "we mustn't linger, or it will be night
before we reach Beni-Mora."

"Let it be night," he said. "Dark night!"

The horses moved slowly on, descending the hill on which stood the
bordj.

"Dark--dark night!" he said again.

She said nothing. They rode into the plain. When they were there he
said:

"Domini, do you understand--do you realise?"

"What, Boris?" she asked quietly.

"All that we are leaving to-day?"

"Yes, I understand."

"Are we--are we leaving it for ever?"

"We must not think of that."

"How can we help it? What else can we think of? Can one govern the
mind?"

"Surely, if we can govern the heart."

"Sometimes," he said, "sometimes I wonder----"

He looked at her. Something in her face made it impossible for him to
go on, to say what he had been going to say. But she understood the
unfinished sentence.

"If you can wonder, Boris," she said, "you don't know me, you don't know
me at all!"

"Domini," he said, "I don't wonder. But sometimes I understand your
strength, and sometimes it seems to me scarcely human, scarcely the
strength of a woman."

She lifted her whip and pointed to the dark shadow far away.

"I can just see the tower," she said. "Can't you?"

"I will not look," he said. "I cannot. If you can, you are stronger than
I. When I remember that it was on that tower you first spoke to me--oh,
Domini, if we could only go back! It is in our power. We have only to
draw a rein and--and--"

"I look at the tower," she said, "as once I looked at the desert. It
calls us, the shadow of the palm trees calls us, as once the desert
did."

"But the voice--what a different voice! Can you listen to it?"

"I have been listening to it ever since we left Amara. Yes, it is a
different voice, but we must obey it as we obeyed the voice of the
desert. Don't you feel that?"

"If I do it is because you tell me to feel it; you tell me that I must
feel it."

His words seemed to hurt her. An expression of pain came into her face.

"Boris," she said, "don't make me regret too terribly that I ever came
into your life. When you speak like that I feel almost as if you were
putting me in the place of--of--I feel as if you were depending upon me
for everything that you are doing, as if you were letting your own will
fall asleep. The desert brings drea