"
His head dropped lower and his face hardened as he looked over the edge
of the parapet to the village, the blue desert. Then he lifted his eyes
to the mountains and the clear sky and the shadowy moon. Each element in
the evening scene was examined with a fierce, painful scrutiny, as if he
was resolved to wring from each its secret.
"Why, yes," he added in a low, muttering voice full of a sort of
terrified surprise, "it is so. You are right. Why, yes, it is calm
here."
He spoke like a man who had been suddenly convinced, beyond power of
further unbelief, of something he had never suspected, never dreamed of.
And the conviction seemed to be bitter to him, even alarming.
"But away out there must be the real home of peace, I think," Domini
said.
"Where?" said the man, quickly.
She pointed towards the south.
"In the depths of the desert," she said. "Far away from civilisation,
far away from modern men and modern women, and all the noisy trifles we
are accustomed to."
He looked towards the south eagerly. In everything he did there was a
flamelike intensity, as if he could not perform an ordinary action, or
turn his eyes upon any object, without calling up in his mind, or heart,
a violence of thought or of feeling.
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