e kitchen and the rooms for the servants are in different parts
of the garden. There is the dining-room."

He pointed with his rose to a large white building, whose dazzling walls
showed here and there through the masses of trees to the left, where a
little raised sand-path with flattened, sloping sides wound away into a
maze of shadows diapered with gold.

"Let us go down that path," Domini said almost in a whisper.

The spell of the place was descending upon her. This was surely a home
of dreams, a haven where the sun came to lie down beneath the trees and
sleep.

"What is your name?" she added.

"Smain," replied the Arab. "I was born in this garden. My father,
Mohammed, was with Monsieur the Count."

He led the way over the sand, moving silently on his long, brown feet,
straight as a reed in a windless place. Domini followed, holding her
breath. Only sometimes she let her strong imagination play utterly at
its will. She let it go now as she and Smain turned into the golden
diapered shadows of the little path and came into the swaying mystery
of the trees. The longing for secrecy, for remoteness, for the beauty of
far away had sometimes haunted her, especially in the troubled moments
of her life. Her heart, oppressed, had overleaped the horizon line
in answer to a calling from hidden things beyond. Her emotions had
wandered, seeking the great distances in which the dim purple twilight
holds surely comfort for those who suffer. But she had never thought to
find any garden of peace that realised her dreams. Nevertheless, she was
already conscious that Smain with his rose was showing her the way to
her ideal, that her feet were set upon its pathway, that its legendary
trees were closing round her.

Behind the evergreen hedge she heard the liquid bubbling of a hidden
waterfall, and when they had left the untempered sunlight behind them
this murmur grew louder. It seemed as if the green gloom in which they
walked acted as a sounding-board to the delicious voice. The little
path wound on and on between two running rills of water, which slipped
incessantly away under the broad and yellow-tipped leaves of dwarf
palms, making a music so faint that it was more like a remembered sound
in the mind than one which slid upon the ear. On either hand towered a
jungle of trees brought to this home in the desert from all parts of the
world.

There were many unknown to Domini, but she recognised several varieties
of palms, acac