Androvsky looked profoundly agitated.  His hands dropped down.

“I must go,” he said.  “I must go to the priest.”

He got up from the sand.

“Come to the tent, Domini.”

She rose to her feet.

“When you come back,” she said, “I shall be waiting for you, Boris.”

He looked at her.  There was in his eyes a piercing wistfulness.  He opened his lips.  At that moment Domini felt that he was on the point of telling her all that she longed to know.  But the look faded.  The lips closed.  He took her in his arms and kissed her almost desperately.

“No, no,” he said.  “I’ll keep your love—­I’ll keep it.”

“You could never lose it.”

“I might.”

“Never.”

“If I believed that.”

“Boris!”

Suddenly burning tears rushed from her eyes.

“Don’t ever say a thing like that to me again!” she said with passion.

She pointed to the grave close to them.

“If you were there,” she said, “and I was living, and you had died before—­before you had told me—­I believe—­God forgive me, but I do believe that if, when you died, I were taken to heaven I should find my hell there.”

She looked through her tears at the words:  “Priez pour lui.”

“To pray for the dead,” she whispered, as if to herself.  “To pray for my dead—­I could not do it—­I could not.  Boris, if you love me you must trust me, you must give me your sorrow.”

The night drew on.  Androvsky had gone to the priest.  Domini was alone, sitting before the tent waiting for his return.  She had told Batouch and Ouardi that she wanted nothing more, that no one was to come to the tent again that night.  The young moon was rising over the city, but its light as yet was faint.  It fell upon the cupolas of the Bureau Arabe, the towers of the mosque and the white sands, whose whiteness it seemed to emphasise, making them pale as the face of one terror-stricken.  The city wall cast a deep shadow over the moat of sand in which, wrapped in filthy rags, lay nomads sleeping.  Upon the sand-hills the camps were alive with movement.  Fires blazed and smoke ascended before the tents that made patches of blackness upon the waste.  Round the fires were seated groups of men devouring cous-cous and the red soup beloved of the nomad.  Behind them circled the dogs with quivering nostrils.  Squadrons of camels lay crouched in the sand, resting after their journeys.  And everywhere, from the city and from the waste, rose distant sounds of music, thin, aerial flutings like voices of the night winds, acrid cries from the pipes, and the far-off rolling of the African drums that are the foundation of every desert symphony.