Count Anteoni read this letter two or three times carefully, with a
grave face.
"Why did she not put Domini Androvsky?" he said to himself. He locked
the letter in a drawer. All that night he was haunted by thoughts of
the garden. Again and again it seemed to him that he stood with Domini
beside the white wall and saw, in the burning distance of the desert, at
the call of the Mueddin, the Arabs bowing themselves in prayer, and
the man--the man to whom now she had bound herself by the most holy
tie--fleeing from prayer as if in horror.
"But it was written," he murmured to himself. "It was written in the
sand and in fire: 'The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.'"
In the dawn when, turning towards the rising sun, he prayed, he
remembered Domini and her words: "Pray in the desert for us." And in the
Garden of Allah he prayed to Allah for her, and for Androvsky.
Meanwhile the camp had been struck, and the first stage of the journey
northward, the journey back, had been accomplished. Domini had given the
order of departure, but she had first spoken with Androvsky.
After his narrative, and her words that followed it, he did not come
into the tent.
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