and huge shrubs, green and sweet-smelling. Hearing their song, Claire
came out of her tent. The sky was red, and, in the southwest, turrets of
vapour rose and streamed out, assuming mysterious and thin shapes in the
gathering dimness. A great flock of birds, flying very high, and forming
a definite and beautiful pattern, passed slowly on the wing towards the
kingdom of the storks, that lies near the sand banks of Ceuta. They
moved in silence, and faded away in the twilight stealthily, like things
full of quiet intention and governed by some furtive, but inexorable,
desire. Renfrew, who was wandering rather miserably near the camp,
watching descending pilgrims from the city melt into the vast bosom of
the plain, saw Claire's white figure in the tent door, half hidden in a
soft rosy mist which stole from the lips of evening as scent steals from
the lips of a flower. He felt afraid to go to her. He possessed her; and
yet it seemed to him now that he scarcely knew her. He was only an
ordinary man. She was a strange woman; not merely because of her
womanhood, as all women are to all men, but strange in that which lay
beyond and beneath her womanhood, in her genius, and in the dull or
ardent moods that stood round it, one, and yet not one, with it. In the
tent door she leaned like a spirit born of the evening, a child of
fading things, dying lights, fainting colours, retreating sounds,--a
spirit waiting for the coming of the stars, and the rising of the moon,
and the mysteries of the night, and the subtle odours that the winds of
Northern Africa bring with them over the mountains and down the lonely
valleys, when the sun descends. And as a spirit may listen to the songs
of men, with the melancholy of a thing apart, she listened to the songs
of the Moors, until at length they seemed to be in her own heart that
evening, as if they were songs of her own country. And these dark men
with wild eyes who sang them, while they flung upon the grass their
burdens from the thickets, and from the hedgeless and wide fields, were
no longer alien to her. She stood in the tent door, and, without any
conscious effort of the imagination, became their fancied mate,--a woman
sprung from the same soil, or come in--like the strange people--from the
deserts of their country. Only she was not as one of their women,
mindless, patient, and concealed; but as their women should be, strong,
hot-blooded, brave, serene, and looked upon by a world without repr