and need not, should
not, wait for death to seek bravely their comradeship. She was love
triumphant, woman utterly fearless because instinctively aware that she
was fulflling her divine mission.

As he gazed at her the priest had a strange thought--of how Christ's
face must have looked when he said, "Lazarus, come forth!"

Androvsky stood by her, but the priest did not look at him.

The wind roared round the church, the narrow windows rattled, and
the clouds of sand driven against them made a pattering as of fingers
tapping frantically upon the glass. The buff-coloured curtains trembled,
and the dusty pink ribands tied round the ropes of the chandeliers
shook incessantly to and fro, as if striving to escape and to join the
multitudes of torn and disfigured things that were swept through space
by the breath of the storm. Beyond the windows, vaguely seen at moments
through the clouds of sand, the outlines of the palm leaves wavered,
descended, rose, darted from side to side, like hands of the demented.

Suzanne, who was one of the witnesses, trembled, and moved her full lips
nervously. She disapproved utterly of her mistress' wedding, and still
more of a honeymoon in the desert. For herself she did not care, very
shortly she was going to marry Monsieur Helmuth, the important person in
livery who accompanied the hotel omnibus to the station, and meanwhile
she was to remain at Beni-Mora under the chaperonage of Madame Armande,
the proprietor of the hotel. But it shocked her that a mistress of hers,
and a member of the English aristocracy, should be married in a costume
suitable for a camel ride, and should start off to go to _le Bon Dieu_
alone knew where, shut up in a palanquin like any black woman covered
with lumps of coral and bracelets like handcuffs.

The other witnesses were the mayor of Beni-Mora, a middle-aged doctor,
who wore the conventional evening-dress of French ceremony, and
looked as if the wind had made him as sleepy as a bear on the point of
hibernating, and the son of Madame Armande, a lively young man, with a
bullet head and eager, black eyes. The latter took a keen interest
in the ceremony, but the mayor blinked pathetically, and occasionally
rubbed his large hooked nose as if imploring it to keep his whole person
from drooping down into a heavy doze.

The priest, speaking in a conventional voice that was strangely
inexpressive of his inward emotion, asked Androvsky and Domini whether
they would t