ounded like a noise coming from
something very wide, and spread out as a veil over an immense surface.
She got up, walked across the floor to the open window and unfastened
the _persiennes_. Heavy rain was falling. The night was very black,
and smelt rich and damp, as if it held in its arms strange offerings--a
merchandise altogether foreign, tropical and alluring. As she stood
there, face to face with a wonder that she could not see, Domini forgot
Newman. She felt the brave companionship of mystery. In it she divined
the beating pulses, the hot, surging blood of freedom.

She wanted freedom, a wide horizon, the great winds, the great sun, the
terrible spaces, the glowing, shimmering radiance, the hot, entrancing
moons and bloomy, purple nights of Africa. She wanted the nomad's fires
and the acid voices of the Kabyle dogs. She wanted the roar of the
tom-toms, the dash of the cymbals, the rattle of the negroes' castanets,
the fluttering, painted figures of the dancers. She wanted--more than
she could express, more than she knew. It was there, want, aching in
her heart, as she drew into her nostrils this strange and wealthy
atmosphere.

When Domini returned to her bed she found it impossible to read any more
Newman. The rain and the scents coming up out of the hidden earth of
Africa had carried her mind away, as if on a magic carpet. She was
content now to lie awake in the dark.

Domini was thirty-two, unmarried, and in a singularly independent--some
might have thought a singularly lonely--situation. Her father, Lord
Rens, had recently died, leaving Domini, who was his only child, a
large fortune. His life had been a curious and a tragic one. Lady Rens,
Domini's mother, had been a great beauty of the gipsy type, the daughter
of a Hungarian mother and of Sir Henry Arlworth, one of the most
prominent and ardent English Catholics of his day. A son of his became a
priest, and a famous preacher and writer on religious subjects. Another
child, a daughter, took the veil. Lady Rens, who was not clever,
although she was at one time almost universally considered to have the
face of a muse, shared in the family ardour for the Church, but was far
too fond of the world to leave it. While she was very young she met Lord
Rens, a Lifeguardsman of twenty-six, who called himself a Protestant,
but who was really quite happy without any faith. He fell madly in love
with her and, in order to marry her, became a Catholic, and even a very
de