rectly those tiny, moving specks became one
with the desert she knew that a gap had opened in her life. It might be
small, but it seemed dark and deep. For the first time the desert, which
she had hitherto regarded as a giver, had taken something from her. And
now, as she sat looking at it, while the sun grew stronger and the light
more brilliant, while the mountains gradually assumed a harsher aspect,
and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became,
as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and
terrible aspect of it. That which has the power to bestow has another
power. She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts
of the desert's hands. Would she some day, or in the night when the sky
was like a sapphire, see the procession of those from whom the desert
had taken away perhaps their dreams, perhaps their hopes, perhaps even
all that they passionately loved and had desperately clung to?

And in which of the two processions would she walk?

She got up with a sigh. The garden had become tragic to her for the
moment, full of a brooding melancholy. As she turned to leave it she
resolved to go to the priest. She had never yet entered his house. Just
then she wanted to speak to someone with whom she could be as a little
child, to whom she could liberate some part of her spirit simply,
certain of a simple, yet not foolish, reception of it by one to whom she
could look up. She desired to be not with the friend so much as with
the spiritual director. Something was alive within her, something of
distress, almost of apprehension, which needed the soothing hand, not of
human love, but of religion.

When she reached the priest's house Beni-Mora was astir with a pleasant
bustle of life. The military note pealed through its symphony. Spahis
were galloping along the white roads. Tirailleurs went by bearing
despatches. Zouaves stood under the palms, staring calmly at the
morning, their sunburned hands loosely clasped upon muskets whose butts
rested in the sand. But Domini scarcely noticed the brilliant gaiety of
the life about her. She was preoccupied, even sad. Yet, as she entered
the little garden of the priest, and tapped gently at his door, a
sensation of hope sprang up in her heart, born of the sustaining power
of her religion.

An Arab boy answered her knock, said that the Father was in and led her
at once to a small, plainly-furnished room, with whitewashed walls, a