“Yet, as we rode in, I had a feeling that the heart of the desert was here,” she said.  “You know I said so.”

“Do you say so still?”

“The heart, Boris, is the centre of life, isn’t it?”

He was silent.  She felt his inner feeling fighting hers.

“To-night,” she said, putting her arm through his, and looking towards the city.  “I feel a tremendous sympathy with human life such as I never felt before.  Boris, it comes to me from you.  Yes, it does.  It is born of my love for you, and seems to link me, and you with me, to all these strangers, to all men and women, to everything that lives.  It is as if I was not quite human before, and my love for you had made me completely human, had done something to me that even—­even my love for God had not been able to do.”

She lowered her voice at the last words.  After a moment she added: 

“Perhaps in isolation, even with you, I could not come to completeness.  Perhaps you could not in isolation even with me.  Boris, I think it’s good for us to be in the midst of life for a time.”

“You wish to remain here, Domini?”

“Yes, for a time.”

The fatalistic feeling that had sometimes come upon her in this land entered into her at this moment.  She felt, “It is written that we are to remain here.”

“Let us remain here, Domini,” he said quietly.

The note of disappointment had gone out of his voice, deliberately banished from it by his love for her, but she seemed to hear it, nevertheless, echoing far down in his soul.  At that moment she loved him like a woman he had made a lover, but also like a woman he had made a mother by becoming a child.

“Thank you, Boris,” she answered very quietly.  “You are good to me.”

“You are good to me,” he said, remembering the last words of Father Roubier.  “How can I be anything else?”

Directly he had spoken the words his body trembled violently.

“Boris, what is it?” she exclaimed, startled.

He took his arm away from hers.

“These—­these noises of the city in the night coming across the sand-hills are extraordinary.  I have become so used to silence that perhaps they get upon my nerves.  I shall grow accustomed to them presently.”

He turned towards the tents, and she went with him.  It seemed to her that he had evaded her question, that he had not wished to answer it, and the sense sharply awakened in her by a return to life near a city made her probe for the reason of this.  She did not find it, but in her mental search she found herself presently at Mogar.  It seemed to her that the same sort of uneasiness which had beset her husband at Mogar beset him now more fiercely at Amara, that, as he had just said, his nerves were being tortured by something.  But it could not be the noises from the city.

After dinner Batouch came to the tent to suggest that they should go down with him into the city.  Domini, feeling certain that Androvsky would not wish to go, at once refused, alleging that she was tired.  Batouch then asked Androvsky to go with him, and, to Domini’s astonishment, he said that if she did not mind his leaving her for a short time he would like a stroll.