hey went a little farther from
Beni-Mora, came a little nearer to that liberty of which Domini
sometimes dreamed, to the smiling eyes and the lifted spheres of fire.

She shut her eyes now. She did not want to see her husband or to touch
his hand. She did not want to speak. She only wanted to feel in the
uttermost depths of her spirit this movement, steady and persistent,
towards the goal of her earthly desires, to realise absolutely the
marvellous truth that after years of lovelessness, and a dreaminess more
benumbing than acute misery, happiness more intense than any she had
been able to conceive of in her moments of greatest yearning was being
poured into her heart, that she was being taken to the place where she
would be with the one human being whose presence blotted out even the
memory of the false world and gave to her the true. And whereas in
the dead years she had sometimes been afraid of feeling too much the
emptiness and the desolation of her life, she was now afraid of feeling
too little its fulness and its splendour, was afraid of some day looking
back to this superb moment of her earthly fate, and being conscious that
she had not grasped its meaning till it was gone, that she had done that
most terrible of all things--realised that she had been happy to
the limits of her capacity for happiness only when her happiness was
numbered with the past.

But could that ever be? Was Time, such Time as this, not Eternity? Could
such earthly things as this intense joy ever have been and no longer
be? It seemed to her that it could not be so. She felt like one who held
Eternity's hand, and went out with that great guide into the endlessness
of supreme perfection. For her, just then, the Creator's scheme was
rounded to a flawless circle. All things fell into order, stars and men,
the silent growing things, the seas, the mountains and the plains,
fell into order like a vast choir to obey the command of the canticle:

"Benedicite, omnia opera!"

"Bless ye the Lord!" The roaring of the wind about the palanquin became
the dominant voice of this choir in Domini's ears.

"Bless ye the Lord!" It was obedient, not as the slave, but as the free
will is obedient, as her heart, which joined its voice with this wind
of the desert was obedient, because it gloriously chose with all its
powers, passions, aspirations to be so. The real obedience is only love
fulfilling its last desire, and this great song was the fulfilling of
the