ords, by the pressure of her arms, the
pressure of her lips, the beating of her heart against his heart. She
longed to do this so ardently that she moved restlessly, looking up at
him with a light in her eyes that he had never seen in them before, not
even when they watched the fire dying down at Arba. But she did not lift
her hand to his.

"Boris," she said, "go. God will be with you."

After a moment she added:

"And all my heart."

He stood, as if waiting, a long time. She had ceased from moving and
had withdrawn her eyes from his. In his soul a voice was saying, "If she
does not touch you now she will never touch you again." And he waited.
He could not help waiting.

"Boris," she whispered, "good-bye."

"Good-bye?" he said.

"Come to me--afterwards. Come to me in the garden. I shall be there
where we--I shall be there waiting for you."

He went out without another word.

When he was gone she went on to the verandah quickly and looked over the
parapet. She saw him come out from beneath the arcade and walk slowly
across the road to the little gate of the enclosure before the house of
the priest. As he lifted his hands to open the gate there was the sound
of a bark, and she saw Bous-Bous run out with a manner of stern
inquiry, which quickly changed to joyful welcome as he recognised an old
acquaintance. Androvsky bent down, took up the little dog in his arms,
and, holding him, walked to the house door. In a moment it was opened
and he went in. Then Domini set out towards the garden, avoiding the
village street, and taking a byway which skirted the desert. She walked
quickly. She longed to be within the shadows of the garden behind the
white wall. She did not feel much, think much, as she walked. Without
self-consciously knowing it she was holding all her nature, the whole of
herself, fiercely in check. She did not look about her, did not see the
sunlit reaches of the desert, or the walls of the houses of Beni-Mora,
or the palm trees. Only when she had passed the hotel and the negro
village and turned to the left, to the track at the edge of which the
villa of Count Anteoni stood, did she lift her eyes from the ground.
They rested on the white arcade framing the fierce blue of the cloudless
sky. She stopped short. Her nature seemed to escape from the leash by
which she had held it in with a rush, to leap forward, to be in the
garden and in the past, in the past with its passion and its fiery
hopes, its magni