ated. "The life to
come--the life of Madame--I see it in the bag!"

His face looked tortured. Domini walked on hurriedly. When she had
got to a little distance she glanced back. The man was standing in the
middle of the road and glaring into the bag. His voice came down the
street to her.

"Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu! I see it--I see--je vois la vie de
Madame--Ah! Mon Dieu!"

There was an accent of dreadful suffering in his voice. It made Domini
shudder.

She passed the mouth of the dancers' street. At the corner there was
a large Cafe Maure, and here, on rugs laid by the side of the road,
numbers of Arabs were stretched, some sipping tea from glasses, some
playing dominoes, some conversing, some staring calmly into vacancy,
like animals drowned in a lethargic dream. A black boy ran by holding
a hammered brass tray on which were some small china cups filled with
thick coffee. Halfway up the street he met three unveiled women clad in
voluminous white dresses, with scarlet, yellow, and purple handkerchiefs
bound over their black hair. He stopped and the women took the cups with
their henna-tinted fingers. Two young Arabs joined them. There was a
scuffle. White lumps of sugar flew up into the air. Then there was a
babel of voices, a torrent of cries full of barbaric gaiety.

Before it had died out of Domini's ears she stood by the statue of
Cardinal Lavigerie. Rather militant than priestly, raised high on a
marble pedestal, it faced the long road which, melting at last into a
faint desert track, stretched away to Tombouctou. The mitre upon the
head was worn surely as if it were a helmet, the pastoral staff with its
double cross was grasped as if it were a sword. Upon the lower cross was
stretched a figure of the Christ in agony. And the Cardinal, gazing
with the eyes of an eagle out into the pathless wastes of sand that lay
beyond the palm trees, seemed, by his mere attitude, to cry to all the
myriad hordes of men the deep-bosomed Sahara mothered in her mystery and
silence, "Come unto the Church! Come unto me!"

He called men in from the desert. Domini fancied his voice echoing along
the sands till the worshippers of Allah and of his Prophet heard it like
a clarion in Tombouctou.

When she reached the great hotel the sun was just beginning to set. She
drew Count Anteoni's card from her glove and rang the bell. After a
long interval a magnificent man, with the features of an Arab but a skin
almost as black as a neg