y hands, O loving man!
And sing to the Derbouka that is the love of women.
Janat! Janat! Janat!"

In the doorway, where the lamp swung from the beam, a man in European
dress stood still to listen. The wind wailed behind him and stirred his
clothes. His eyes shone in the faint light with a fierceness of emotion
in which there was a joy that was almost terrible, but in which there
seemed also to be something that was troubled. When the song died away,
and only the voices of the wind and the drum spoke to the darkness, he
disappeared into the night. The Arabs did not see him.

"Janat! Janat! Janat!"

The night drew on and the storm increased. All the doors of the houses
were closely shut. Upon the roofs the guard dogs crouched, shivering
and whining, against the earthen parapets. The camels groaned in the
fondouks, and the tufted heads of the palms swayed like the waves of the
sea. And the Sahara seemed to be lifting up its voice in a summons that
was tremendous as a summons to Judgment.

Domini had always known that the desert would summon her. She heard its
summons now in the night without fear. The roaring of the tempest was
sweet in her ears as the sound of the Derbouka to the loving man of the
sands. It accorded with the fire that lit up the cloud of passion in
her heart. Its wildness marched in step with a marching wildness in
her veins and pulses. For her gipsy blood was astir to-night, and the
recklessness of the boy in her seemed to clamour with the storm. The
sound of the wind was as the sound of the clashing cymbals of Liberty,
calling her to the adventure that love would glorify, to the far-away
life that love would make perfect, to the untrodden paths of the sun
of which she had dreamed in the shadows, and on which she would set her
feet at last with the comrade of her soul.

To-morrow her life would begin, her real life, the life of which men
and women dream as the prisoner dreams of freedom. And she was glad,
she thanked God, that her past years had been empty of joy, that in her
youth she had been robbed of youth's pleasures. She thanked God that she
had come to maturity without knowing love. It seemed to her that to love
in early life was almost pitiful, was a catastrophe, an experience for
which the soul was not ready, and so could not appreciate at its full
and wonderful value. She thought of it as of a child being taken away
from the world to Paradise without having known the pain