the hidden gardens, "is the desert new to you?"

She longed to know.

"Yes, Madame."

"I thought perhaps--I wondered a little whether you had travelled in it
already."

"No, Madame. I saw it for the first time the day before yesterday."

"When I did."

"Yes."

So they had entered it for the first time together. She was silent,
watching the pale smoke curl up through the shade and out into the glare
of the sun, the lizards creeping over the hot earth, the flies circling
beneath the lofty walls, the palm trees looking over into this garden
from the gardens all around, gardens belonging to Eastern people, born
here, and who would probably die here, and go to dust among the roots of
the palms.

On the earthen bank on the far side of the stream there appeared, while
she gazed, a brilliant figure. It came soundlessly on bare feet from
a hidden garden; a tall, unveiled girl, dressed in draperies of vivid
magenta, who carried in her exquisitely-shaped brown hands a number of
handkerchiefs--scarlet, orange, yellow green and flesh colour. She did
not glance into the _auberge_ garden, but caught up her draperies into
a bunch with one hand, exposing her slim legs far above the knees, waded
into the stream, and bending, dipped the handkerchiefs in the water.

The current took them. They streamed out on the muddy surface of the
stream, and tugged as if, suddenly endowed with life, they were striving
to escape from the hand that held them.

The girl's face was beautiful, with small regular features and lustrous,
tender eyes. Her figure, not yet fully developed, was perfect in shape,
and seemed to thrill softly with the spirit of youth. Her tint of bronze
suggested statuary, and every fresh pose into which she fell, while the
water eddied about her, strengthened the suggestion. With the golden
sunlight streaming upon her, the brown banks, the brown waters, the
brown walls throwing up the crude magenta of her bunched-up draperies,
the vivid colours of the handkerchiefs that floated from her hand, with
the feathery palms beside her, the cloudless blue sky above her, she
looked so strangely African and so completely lovely that Domini watched
her with an almost breathless attention.

She withdrew the handkerchiefs from the stream, waded out, and spread
them one by one upon the low earth wall to dry, letting her draperies
fall. When she had finished disposing them she turned round, and, no
longer preoccupied with her task, l