and the whole universe as it was presented to
her, as she observed and felt it. Nothing remained as it was when he did
not touch her. There was something stupefying in the thought, something
almost terrible. The wonder that is alive in the tiny things of love,
and that makes tremendously important their presence in, or absence
from, a woman's life, took hold on her completely for the first time,
and set her forever in a changed world, a world in which a great
knowledge ruled instead of a great ignorance. With the consciousness
of exactly what Androvsky's touch meant to her came a multiple
consciousness of a thousand other things, all connected with him and her
consecrated relation to him. She quivered with understanding. All
the gates of her soul were being opened, and the white light of
comprehension of those things which make life splendid and fruitful was
pouring in upon her. Within the dim, contained space of the palanquin,
that was slowly carried onward through the passion of the storm, there
was an effulgence of unseen glory that grew in splendour moment by
moment. A woman was being born of a woman, woman who knew herself of
woman who did not know herself, woman who henceforth would divinely love
her womanhood of woman who had often wondered why she had been created
woman.

The words muttered by the man of the sand in Count Anteoni's garden were
coming true. In the church of Beni-Mora the life of Domini had begun
more really than when her mother strove in the pains of childbirth and
her first faint cry answered the voice of the world's light when it
spoke to her.

Slowly the caravan moved on. The camel-drivers sang low under the folds
of their haiks those mysterious songs of the East that seem the songs
of heat and solitude. Batouch, smothered in his burnous, his large head
sunk upon his chest, slumbered like a potentate relieved from cares of
State. Till Arba was reached his duty was accomplished. Ali, perched
behind him on the camel, stared into the dimness with eyes steady and
remote as those of a vulture of the desert. The houses of Beni-Mora
faded in the mist of the sand, the statue of the Cardinal holding the
double cross, the tower of the hotel, the shuddering trees of Count
Anteoni's garden. Along the white blue which was the road the camels
painfully advanced, urged by the cries and the sticks of the running
drivers. Presently the brown buildings of old Beni-Mora came partially
into sight, peeping here