turned. The impulse to speak
began to fail, and when she glanced up at the man's face she no longer
felt it at all. For, despite the glory of the sunset on him, there
seemed to be a cold shadow in his eyes. The faint lines near his
mouth looked deeper than before, and now suggested most powerfully the
dreariness, the harshness of long-continued suffering. The mouth itself
was compressed and grim, and the man's whole expression was fierce and
startling as the expression of a criminal bracing himself to endure
inevitable detection. So crude and piercing indeed was this mask
confronting her that Domini started and was inclined to shudder. For
a minute the man's eyes held hers, and she thought she saw in them
unfathomable depths of misery or of wickedness. She hardly knew which.
Sorrow was like crime, and crime like the sheer desolation of grief to
her just then. And she thought of the outer darkness spoken of in the
Bible. It came before her in the sunset. Her father was in it, and this
stranger stood by him. The thing was as vital, and fled as swiftly as a
hallucination in a madman's brain.

Domini looked down. All the triumph died out in her, all the exquisite
consciousness of the freedom, the colour, the bigness of life. For there
was a black spot on the sun--humanity, God's mistake in the great plan
of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even surely
conquered, the light. She wondered whether she would always feel the
cold of the sunless places in the golden dominion of the sun.

The man had dropped his eyes too. His hand fell from the door to his
knee. He did not move till the train ran into Beni-Mora, and the eager
faces of countless Arabs stared in upon them from the scorched field of
manoeuvres where Spahis were exercising in the gathering twilight.

CHAPTER IV

Having given her luggage ticket to a porter, Domini passed out of the
station followed by Suzanne, who looked and walked like an exhausted
marionette. Batouch, who had emerged from a third-class compartment
before the train stopped, followed them closely, and as they reached the
jostling crowd of Arabs which swarmed on the roadway he joined them with
the air of a proprietor.

"Which is Madame's hotel?"

Domini looked round.

"Ah, Batouch!"

Suzanne jumped as if her string had been sharply pulled, and cast a
glance of dreary suspicion upon the poet. She looked at his legs, then
upwards.

He wore white socks which almost met hi