ipped his coffee. Domini looked at him,
fascinated.

Suzanne shivered. She had been listening. The loud contralto cry of
the Jewess rose up, with its suggestion of violence and of rough
indifference. And Domini repeated softly:

"The great hiding-place."

With every moment in Beni-Mora the desert seemed to become more--more
full of meaning, of variety, of mystery, of terror. Was it everything?
The garden of God, the great hiding-place of murderers! She had called
it, on the tower, the home of peace. In the gorge of El-Akbara, ere he
prayed, Batouch had spoken of it as a vast realm of forgetfulness, where
the load of memory slips from the weary shoulders and vanishes into the
soft gulf of the sands.

But was it everything then? And if it was so much to her already, in a
night and a day, what would it be when she knew it, what would it be to
her after many nights and many days? She began to feel a sort of terror
mingled with the most extraordinary attraction she had ever known.

Hadj crouched right back against the wall. The voice of the Jewess
ceased in a shout. The hautboys stopped playing. Only the tomtoms
roared.

"Hadj can be happy now," observed Batouch in a voice of almost
satisfaction, "for Irena is going to dance. Look! There is the little
Miloud bringing her the daggers."

An Arab boy, with a beautiful face and a very dark skin, slipped on to
the platform with two long, pointed knives in his hand. He laid them on
the table before Irena, between the bouquets of orange blossom, jumped
lightly down and disappeared.

Directly the knives touched the table the hautboy players blew a
terrific blast, and then, swelling the note, till it seemed as if
they must burst both themselves and their instruments, swung into a
tremendous and magnificent tune, a tune tingling with barbarity, yet
such as a European could have sung or written down. In an instant it
gripped Domini and excited her till she could hardly breathe. It poured
fire into her veins and set fire about her heart. It was triumphant as a
great song after war in a wild land, cruel, vengeful, but so strong and
so passionately joyous that it made the eyes shine and the blood leap,
and the spirit rise up and clamour within the body, clamour for utter
liberty, for action, for wide fields in which to roam, for long days and
nights of glory and of love, for intense hours of emotion and of life
lived with exultant desperation. It was a melody that seemed to set