ral but very near the unnatural.

She glanced at him again. He was a big man, but very thin. Her
experienced eyes of an athletic woman told her that he was capable
of great and prolonged muscular exertion. He was big-boned and
deep-chested, and had nervous as well as muscular strength. The timidity
in him was strange in such a man. What could it spring from? It was
not like ordinary shyness, the _gaucherie_ of a big, awkward lout
unaccustomed to woman's society but able to be at his ease and
boisterous in the midst of a crowd of men. Domini thought that he would
be timid even of men. Yet it never struck her that he might be a coward,
unmanly. Such a quality would have sickened her at once, and she knew
she would have at once divined it. He did not hold himself very well,
but was inclined to stoop and to keep his head low, as if he were in the
habit of looking much on the ground. The idiosyncrasy was rather ugly,
and suggested melancholy to her, the melancholy of a man given to
over-much meditation and afraid to face the radiant wonder of life.

She caught herself up at this last thought. She--thinking naturally that
life was full of radiant wonder! Was she then so utterly transformed
already by Beni-Mora? Or had the thought come to her because she stood
side by side with someone whose sorrows had been unfathomably deeper
than her own, and so who, all unconsciously, gave her a knowledge of her
own--till then unsuspected--hopefulness?

She looked at her companion again. He seemed to have relinquished his
intention of leaving her, and was standing quietly beside her, staring
towards the desert, with his head slightly drooped forward. In one hand
he held a thick stick. He had put his hat on again. His attitude was
much calmer than it had been. Already he seemed more at ease with her.
She was glad of that. She did not ask herself why. But the intense
beauty of evening in this land and at this height made her wish
enthusiastically that it could produce a happiness such as it created in
her in everyone. Such beauty, with its voices, its colours, its lines
of tree and leaf, of wall and mountain ridge, its mystery of shapes and
movements, stillness and dreaming distance, its atmosphere of the far
off come near, chastened by journeying, fine with the unfamiliar, its
solemn changes towards the impenetrable night, was too large a thing and
fraught with too much tender and lovable invention to be worshipped in
any selfishness. It