“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 have a sequel.  They had faith.  And it was difficult not to hate them.  But now I am one of them.  I can pray in the desert.”

“That was why you left Beni-Mora.”

“Yes.  I had long been wishing to become a Mohammedan.  I came here to be with the marabout, to enter more fully into certain questions, to see if I had any lingering doubts.”

“And you have none?”

“None.”

She looked at his bright eyes and sighed, thinking of her husband.

“You will go back to Beni-Mora?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.  I am inclined to go farther into the desert, farther among the people of my own faith.  I don’t want to be surrounded by French.  Some day perhaps I may return.  But at present everything draws me onward.  Tell me”—­he dropped the earnest tone in which he had been speaking, and she heard once more the easy, half-ironical man of the world—­“do you think me a half-crazy eccentric?”

“No!”

“You look at me very gravely, even sadly.”

“I was thinking of the men who cannot pray,” she said, “even in the desert.”

“They should not come into the Garden of Allah.  Don’t you remember that day by the garden wall, when—­”

He suddenly checked himself.

“Forgive me,” he said simply.  “And now tell me about yourself.  You never wrote that you were going to be married.”