isper, set on fire by a glance. To such a nature life in
the world must be perpetual torture. She thought of him with a sorrow
that--strangely in her--was not tinged with contempt. That which
manifested by another man would certainly have moved her to impatience,
if not to wrath, in this man woke other sensations--curiosity, pity,
terror.

Yes--terror. To-night she knew that. The long day, begun in the
semidarkness before the dawn and ending in the semidarkness of the
twilight, had, with its events that would have seemed to another
ordinary and trivial enough, carried her forward a stage on an emotional
pilgrimage. The half-veiled warnings of Count Anteoni and of the priest,
followed by the latter's almost passionately abrupt plain speaking,
had not been without effect. To-night something of Europe and her
life there, with its civilised experience and drastic training in the
management of woman's relations with humanity in general, crept back
under the palm trees and the brilliant stars of Africa; and despite the
fatalism condemned by Father Roubier, she was more conscious than she
had hitherto been of how others--the outside world--would be likely
to regard her acquaintance with Androvsky. She stood, as it were, and
looked on at the events in which she herself had been and was involved,
and in that moment she was first aware of a thrill of something akin to
terror, as if, perhaps, without knowing it, she had been moving amid
a great darkness, as if perhaps a great darkness were approaching.
Suddenly she saw Androvsky as some strange and ghastly figure of legend;
as the wandering Jew met by a traveller at cross roads and distinguished
for an instant in an oblique lightning flash; as Vanderdecken passing
in the hurricane and throwing a blood-red illumination from the sails
of his haunted ship; as the everlasting climber of the Brocken, as the
shrouded Arab of the Eastern legend, who announced coming disaster to
the wanderers in the desert by beating a death-roll on a drum among the
dunes.

And with Count Anteoni and the priest she set another figure, that of
the sand-diviner, whose tortured face had suggested a man looking on a
fate that was terrible. Had not he, too, warned her? Had not the warning
been threefold, been given to her by the world, the Church, and the
under-world--the world beneath the veil?

She met Androvsky's eyes. He was getting up to leave the room. His
movement caught her away from things visionar