; he pointed to them; they disappeared. "The birds, too, they must
have companionship. Everything wants a companion."

"Yes."

"But then--you will stay here alone in the desert?"

"What else can I do?" she said.

"And that journey," he went on, still holding her hand fast against his
side, "Your journey into the desert--you will take it alone?"

"What else can I do?" she repeated in a lower voice.

It seemed to her that he was deliberately pressing her down into the
uttermost darkness.

"You will not go."

"Yes, I shall go."

She spoke with conviction. Even in that moment--most of all in that
moment--she knew that she would obey the summons of the desert.

"I--I shall never know the desert," he said. "I thought--it seemed to me
that I, too, should go out into it. I have wanted to go. You have made
me want to go."

"I?"

"Yes. Once you said to me that peace must dwell out there. It was on the
tower the--the first time you ever spoke to me."

"I remember."

"I wondered--I often wonder why you spoke to me."

She knew he was looking at her with intensity, but she kept her eyes on
the sand. There was something in them that she felt he must not see, a
light that had just come into them as she realised that already, on the
tower before she even knew him, she had loved him. It was that love,
already born in her heart but as yet unconscious of its own existence,
which had so strangely increased for her the magic of the African
evening when she watched it with him. But before--suddenly she knew that
she had loved Androvsky from the beginning, from the moment when his
face looked at her as if out of the heart of the sun. That was why her
entry into the desert had been full of such extraordinary significance.
This man and the desert were, had always been, as one in her mind.
Never had she thought of the one without the other. Never had she been
mysteriously called by the desert without hearing as a far-off echo the
voice of Androvsky, or been drawn onward by the mystical summons of the
blue distances without being drawn onward, too, by the mystical summons
of the heart to which her own responded. The link between the man
and the desert was indissoluble. She could not conceive of its being
severed, and as she realised this, she realised also something that
turned her whole nature into flame.

She could not conceive of Androvsky's not loving her, of his not having
loved her from the moment when he saw her in the