eir faces, she was
unconscious of any secret, combative force in him. It was impossible to
her to think there could have been any combat, however inward, however
subtle, between them. Surely if it were ever permitted to two natures to
be in perfect accord theirs were in perfect accord to-night.

"I never felt the presence of God in His world so keenly as I feel it
to-night," she went on, drawing a little closer to him. "Even in the
church to-day He seemed farther away than tonight. But somehow--one
has these thoughts without knowing why--I have always believed that the
farther I went into the desert the nearer I should come to God."

Androvsky moved again. The clasp of his hand on hers loosened, but he
did not take his hand away.

"Why should--what should make you think that?" he asked slowly.

"Don't you know what the Arabs call the desert?"

"No. What do they call it?"

"The Garden of Allah."

"The Garden of Allah!" he repeated.

There was a sound like fear in his voice. Even her great joy did not
prevent her from noticing it, and she remembered, with a thrill of pain,
where and under what circumstances she had first heard the Arab's name
for the desert.

Could it be that this man she loved was secretly afraid of something in
the desert, some influence, some--? Her thought stopped short, like a
thing confused.

"Don't you think it a very beautiful name?" she asked, with an almost
fierce longing to be reassured, to be made to know that he, like her,
loved the thought that God was specially near to those who travelled in
this land of solitude.

"Is it beautiful?"

"To me it is. It makes me feel as if in the desert I were specially
watched over and protected, even as if I were specially loved there."

Suddenly Androvsky put his arm round her and strained her to him.

"By me! By me!" he said. "Think of me to-night, only of me, as I think
only of you."

He spoke as if he were jealous even of her thought of God, as if he did
not understand that it was the very intensity of her love for him that
made her, even in the midst of the passion of the body, connect
their love of each other with God's love of them. In her heart this
overpowering human love which, in the garden, when first she realised
it fully, had seemed to leave no room in her for love of God, now in the
moment when it was close to absolute satisfaction seemed almost to be
one with her love of God. Perhaps no man could understand how, in a
good