There is a health of body so keen and vital that it desires combat. The
soul sometimes knows a precisely similar health and is filled with a
similar desire.
"Put my love to the proof, O God!" was Domini's last prayer that night
when the storm was at its wildest. "Put my love to the uttermost proof
that he may know it, as he can never know it otherwise."
And she fell asleep at length, peacefully, in the tumult of the night,
feeling that God had heard her prayer.
The dawn came struggling like an exhausted pilgrim through the windy
dark, pale and faint, with no courage, it seemed, to grow bravely
into day. As if with the sedulous effort of something weary but of
unconquered will, it slowly lit up Beni-Mora with a feeble light that
flickered in a cloud of whirling sand, revealing the desolation of an
almost featureless void. The village, the whole oasis, was penetrated by
a passionate fog that instead of brooding heavily, phlegmatically, over
the face of life and nature travelled like a demented thing bent upon
instant destruction, and coming thus cloudily to be more free for crime.
It was an emissary of the desert, propelled with irresistible force from
the farthest recess of the dunes, and the desert itself seemed to be
hurrying behind it as if to spy upon the doing of its deeds.
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