ught them a little way towards us. Did you
see? Fire wandering on the wind through the night calling to the fire
that is in us. Wasn't it beautiful? Everything is beautiful to-night.
There were never such stars before."

She looked up at them. Often she had watched the stars, and known the
vague longings, the almost terrible aspirations they wake in their
watchers. But to her also they looked different to-night, nearer to the
earth, she thought, brighter, more living than ever before, like strange
tenderness made visible, peopling the night with an unconquerable
sympathy. The vast firmament was surely intent upon their happiness.
Again the breeze came to them across the waste, cool and breathing of
the dryness of the sands. Not far away a jackal laughed. After a pause
it was answered by another jackal at a distance. The voices of these
desert beasts brought home to Domini with an intimacy not felt by her
before the exquisite remoteness of their situation, and the shrill,
discordant noise, rising and falling with a sort of melancholy and
sneering mirth, mingled with bitterness, was like a delicate music in
her ears.

"Hark!" Androvsky whispered.

The first jackal laughed once more, was answered again. A third beast,
evidently much farther off, lifted up a faint voice like a dismal echo.
Then there was silence.

"You loved that, Domini. It was like the calling of freedom to you--and
to me. We've found freedom; we've found it. Let us feel it. Let us take
hold of it. It is the only thing, the only thing. But you can't know
that as I do, Domini."

Again she was conscious that his intensity surpassed hers, and the
consciousness, instead of saddening or vexing, made her thrill with joy.

"I am maddened by this freedom," he said; "maddened by it, Domini. I
can't help--I can't--"

He laid his lips upon hers in a desperate caress that almost suffocated
her. Then he took his lips away from her lips and kissed her throat,
holding her head back against his shoulder. She shut her eyes. He was
indeed teaching her to forget. Even the memory of the day in the garden
when she heard the church bell chime and the sound of Larbi's flute went
from her. She remembered nothing any more. The past was lost or laid in
sleep by the spell of sensation. Her nature galloped like an Arab horse
across the sands towards the sun, towards the fire that sheds warmth
afar but that devours all that draws near to it. At that moment she
connected Andr