r fetish. What woman had more
liberty than she had, here on this lonely verandah, with the shadowy
trees below?

The bell of the church near by chimed softly, and the familiar sound
fell strangely upon Domini's ears out here in Africa, reminding her of
many sorrows. Her religion was linked with terrible memories, with cruel
struggles, with hateful scenes of violence. Lord Rens had been a man of
passionate temperament. Strong in goodness when he had been led by love,
he had been equally strong in evil when hate had led him. Domini had
been forced to contemplate at close quarters the raw character of a
warped man, from whom circumstance had stripped all tenderness, nearly
all reticence. The terror of truth was known to her. She had shuddered
before it, but she had been obliged to watch it during many years. In
coming to Beni-Mora she had had a sort of vague, and almost childish,
feeling that she was putting the broad sea between herself and it. Yet
before she had started it had been buried in the grave. She never wished
to behold such truth again. She wanted to look upon some other truth
of life--the truth of beauty, of calm, of freedom. Lord Rens had always
been a slave, the slave of love, most of all when he was filled with
hatred, and Domini, influenced by his example, instinctively connected
love with a chain. Only the love a human being has for God seemed to her
sometimes the finest freedom; the movement of the soul upward into the
infinite obedient to the call of the great Liberator. The love of man
for woman, of woman for man, she thought of as imprisonment, bondage.
Was not her mother a slave to the man who had wrecked her life and
carried her spirit beyond the chance of heaven? Was not her father a
slave to her mother? She shrank definitely from the contemplation of
herself loving, with all the strength she suspected in her heart, a
human being. In her religion only she had felt in rare moments something
of love. And now here, in this tremendous and conquering land, she felt
a divine stirring in her love for Nature. For that afternoon Nature, so
often calm and meditative, or gently indifferent, as one too complete to
be aware of those who lack completeness, had impetuously summoned her
to worship, had ardently appealed to her for something more than a
temperate watchfulness or a sober admiration. There had been a most
definite demand made upon her. Even in her fatigue and in this dreamy
twilight she was conscious