looked out quietly towards the city.

"Yes, this is the place," he said.

She knew that he was alluding to the vision of the sand-diviner, and
said so.

"Did you believe at the time that what he said would come true?" she
asked.

"How could I? Am I a child?"

He spoke with gentle irony, but she felt he was playing with her.

"Cannot a man believe such things?"

He did not answer her, but said:

"My fate has come to pass. Do you not care to know what it is?"

"Yes, do tell me."

She spoke earnestly. She felt a change in him, a great change which
as yet she did not understand fully. It was as if he had been a man in
doubt and was now a man no longer in doubt, as if he had arrived at some
goal and was more at peace with himself than he had been.

"I have become a Mohammedan," he said simply.

"A Mohammedan!"

She repeated the words as a person repeats words in surprise, but her
voice did not sound surprised.

"You wonder?" he asked.

After a moment she answered:

"No. I never thought of such a thing, but I am not surprised. Now
you have told me it seems to explain you, much that I noticed in you,
wondered about in you."

She looked at him steadily, but without curiosity.

"I feel that you are happy now."

"Yes, I am happy. The world I used to know, my world and yours, would
laugh at me, would say that I was crazy, that it was a whim, that I
wished for a new sensation. Simply it had to be. For years I have been
tending towards it--who knows why? Who knows what obscure influences
have been at work in me, whether there is not perhaps far back, some
faint strain of Arab blood mingled with the Sicilian blood in my veins?
I cannot understand why. What I can understand is that at last I have
fulfilled my destiny! After years of unrest I am suddenly and completely
at peace. It is a magical sensation. I have been wandering all my life
and have come upon the open door of my home."

He spoke very quietly, but she heard the joy in his voice.

"I remember you saying, 'I like to see men praying in the desert.'"

"Yes. When I looked at them I was longing to be one of them. For
years from my garden wall I watched them with a passion of envy, with
bitterness, almost with hatred sometimes. They had something I had not,
something that set them above me, something that made their lives plain
through any complication, and that gave to death a meaning like the
meaning at the close of a great story that is going to