esires combat. The
soul sometimes knows a precisely similar health and is filled with a
similar desire.

"Put my love to the proof, O God!" was Domini's last prayer that night
when the storm was at its wildest. "Put my love to the uttermost proof
that he may know it, as he can never know it otherwise."

And she fell asleep at length, peacefully, in the tumult of the night,
feeling that God had heard her prayer.

The dawn came struggling like an exhausted pilgrim through the windy
dark, pale and faint, with no courage, it seemed, to grow bravely
into day. As if with the sedulous effort of something weary but of
unconquered will, it slowly lit up Beni-Mora with a feeble light that
flickered in a cloud of whirling sand, revealing the desolation of an
almost featureless void. The village, the whole oasis, was penetrated by
a passionate fog that instead of brooding heavily, phlegmatically, over
the face of life and nature travelled like a demented thing bent upon
instant destruction, and coming thus cloudily to be more free for crime.
It was an emissary of the desert, propelled with irresistible force from
the farthest recess of the dunes, and the desert itself seemed to be
hurrying behind it as if to spy upon the doing of its deeds.

As the sea in a great storm rages against the land, ferocious that land
should be, so the desert now raged against the oasis that ventured to
exist in its bosom. Every palm tree was the victim of its wrath, every
running rill, every habitation of man. Along the tunnels of mimosa
it went like a foaming tide through a cavern, roaring towards the
mountains. It returned and swept about the narrow streets, eddying at
the corners, beating upon the palmwood doors, behind which the painted
dancing-girls were cowering, cold under their pigments and their heavy
jewels, their red hands trembling and clasping one another, clamouring
about the minarets of the mosques on which the frightened doves were
sheltering, shaking the fences that shut in the gazelles in their
pleasaunce, tearing at the great statue of the Cardinal that faced it
resolutely, holding up the double cross as if to exorcise it, battering
upon the tall, white tower on whose summit Domini had first spoken with
Androvsky, raging through the alleys of Count Anteoni's garden, the
arcades of his villa, the window-spaces of the _fumoir_, from whose
walls it tore down frantically the purple petals of the bougainvillea
and dashed them, like ene