heard the note of a flute.
The day was very still. She looked at the narrow doorway and remembered
exactly the attitude in which Count Anteoni had stood during their first
interview, holding a trailing branch of the bougainvillea in his hand.
She saw him as a shadow that the desert had taken. Glancing down at the
carpet sand she imagined the figure of the sand-diviner crouching there
and recalled his prophecy, and directly she did this she knew that she
had believed in it. She had believed that one day she would ride, out
into the desert in a storm, and that with her, enclosed in the curtains
of a palanquin, there would be a companion. The Diviner had not told
her who would be this companion. Darkness was about him rendering him
invisible to the eyes of the seer. But her heart had told her. She had
seen the other figure in the palanquin. It was a man. It was Androvsky.

She had believed that she would go out into the desert with Androvsky,
with this traveller of whose history, of whose soul, she knew nothing.
Some inherent fatalism within her had told her so. And now----?

The darkness of the shade beneath the trees in this inmost recess of the
garden fell upon her like the darkness of that storm in which the desert
was blotted out, and it was fearful to her because she felt that she
must travel in the storm alone. Till now she had been very much alone
in life and had realised that such solitude was dreary, that in it
development was difficult, and that it checked the steps of the pilgrim
who should go upward to the heights of life. But never till now had she
felt the fierce tragedy of solitude, the utter terror of it. As she sat
in the _fumoir_, looking down on the smoothly-raked sand, she said to
herself that till this moment she had never had any idea of the meaning
of solitude. It was the desert within a human soul, but the desert
without the sun. And she knew this because at last she loved. The dark
and silent flood of passion that lay within her had been released from
its boundaries, the old landmarks were swept away for ever, the face of
the world was changed.

She loved Androvsky. Everything in her loved him; all that she had been,
all that she was, all that she could ever be loved him; that which was
physical in her, that which was spiritual, the brain, the heart, the
soul, body and flame burning within it--all that made her the wonder
that is woman, loved him. She was love for Androvsky. It seemed to her
th