ou have forgotten?"

"I told you," he said, "I mean to forget everything."

"Everything before we came to Beni-Mora?"

"And more. Everything before you put your hands against my forehead,
Domini. Your touch blotted out the past."

"Even the past at Beni-Mora?"

"Yes, even that. There are many things I did and left undone, many
things I said and never said that--I have forgotten--I have forgotten
for ever."

There was a sternness in his voice now, a fiery intention.

"I understand," she said. "I have forgotten them too, but not some
things."

"Which?"

"Not that night when you took me out of the dancing-house, not our
ride to Sidi-Zerzour, not--there are things I shall remember. When I am
dying, after I am dead, I shall remember them."

The song faded away. The torch was still, then fell downwards and became
one with the fire. Then Androvsky drew Domini down beside him on to the
warm earth before the tent door, and held her hand in his against the
earth.

"Feel it," he said. "It's our home, it's our liberty. Does it feel alive
to you?"

"Yes."

"As if it had pulses, like the pulses in our hearts, and knew what we
know?"

"Yes. Mother Earth--I never understood what that meant till to-night."

"We are beginning to understand together. Who can understand anything
alone?"

He kept her hand always in his pressed against the desert as against
a heart. They both thought of it as a heart that was full of love and
protection for them, of understanding of them. Going back to their words
before the song of Ali, he said:

"Love burns up evil, then love can never be evil."

"Not the act of loving."

"Or what it leads to," he said.

And again there was a sort of sternness in his voice, as if he were
insisting on something, were bent on conquering some reluctance, or some
voice contradicting.

"I know that you are right," he added.

She did not speak, but--why she did not know--her thought went to the
wooden crucifix fastened in the canvas of the tent close by, and for a
moment she felt a faint creeping sadness in her. But he pressed her hand
more closely, and she was conscious only of these two warmths---of his
hand above her hand and of the desert beneath it. Her whole life seemed
set in a glory of fire, in a heat that was life-giving, that dominated
her and evoked at the same time all of power that was in her, causing
her dormant fires, physical and spiritual, to blaze up as if they were
sheltered and