guests sat listening in silence. Domini began to
feel curiously expectant, yet she did not recognise the odd melody. Her
sensation was that some other music must be coming which she had heard
before, which had moved her deeply at some time in her life. She glanced
at the Count and found him looking at her with a whimsical expression,
as if he were a kind conspirator whose plot would soon be known.

"What is it?" she asked in a low voice.

He bent towards her.

"Wait!" he whispered. "Listen!"

She saw Androvsky frown. His face was distorted by an expression of
pain, and she wondered if he, like some Europeans, found the barbarity
of the desert music ugly and even distressing to the nerves. While
she wondered a voice began to sing, always accompanied by the four
instruments. It was a contralto voice, but sounded like a youth's.

"What is that song?" she asked under her breath. "Surely I must have
heard it!"

"You don't know?"

"Wait!"

She searched her heart. It seemed to her that she knew the song. At some
period of her life she had certainly been deeply moved by it--but when?
where? The voice died away, and was succeeded by a soft chorus singing
monotonously:

"Wurra-Wurra."

Then it rose once more in a dreamy and reticent refrain, like the voice
of a soul communing with itself in the desert, above the instruments and
the murmuring chorus.

"You remember?" whispered the Count.

She moved her head in assent but did not speak. She could not speak. It
was the song the Arab had sung as he turned into the shadow of the palm
trees, the song of the freed negroes of Touggourt:

"No one but God and I
Knows what is in my heart."

The priest leaned back in his chair. His dark eyes were cast down, and
his thin, sun-browned hands were folded together in a way that suggested
prayer. Did this desert song of the black men, children of God like
him as their song affirmed, stir his soul to some grave petition that
embraced the wants of all humanity?

Androvsky was sitting quite still. He was also looking down and the lids
covered his eyes. An expression of pain still lingered on his face, but
it was less cruel, no longer tortured, but melancholy. And Domini, as
she listened, recalled the strange cry that had risen within her as the
Arab disappeared in the sunshine, the cry of the soul in life surrounded
by mysteries, by the hands, the footfalls, the voices of hidden
things--"What is going to happen to me he