The Garden of Allah

mini Enfilden from sleeping. There was deep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officers who took their pension there had long since ascended the

lts on their low divans to rest. Only two or three gendarmes were still about, and a few French and Spaniards at the Port, wh

stood up in bristles, stared for a while at nothing in the firm manner of weary men who are at the same time thoughtless and depressed, and thrown himself on his narrow bed in the dusty corner of the little room on the stairs near the front door. Madame, the landlady, had laid aside her fro

ials of the Douane. There were two windows in the room looking out towards the Place de la Marine, below which lay the station. Closed persiennes of brownish-gr

ck bag or a carefully-tied bundle. On the wharf stood a Zouave, in tremendous red trousers and a fez, among great heaps of dull brown woollen rugs. And as the recruits came hesitatingly along he stopped them with a sharp word, examined the tickets they held out, gave each one a rug, and pointed to the gangway that led from the wharf to the vessel. Domini, then leaning over the rail of the upper deck, had noticed the different expressions with which the recruits looked at the Zouave. To all of them he was a phenomenon, a mystery of Africa and of the new life for which they were embarking. He stood there impudently and indifferently among the woollen rugs, his red fez pushed well back on his short, black hair cut en

together. Their poor bundles and bags jostled one against the other. With their clumsy boots they trod on each other's feet. And yet all were lonely strangers. No two in the mob seemed to be acqu

k towards the end, and showed his fatigue to the latest comers, shoving their rugs into their arms with brusque violence. And when at length the wharf was bare he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt hands down the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with the air of a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world. By this time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in line along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towards Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts, its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represent

ons of the rocks and Monte Cristo's dungeon. At the time she hardly knew it, but now, as she lay in bed in the silent inn, she remembered that, keeping her eyes upon the church, she had murmured a confused prayer to the Blessed Virgin for the re

she lay in the dark cabin, looking at the faint radiance that penetrated through the glass shutters of the skylight. The recruits, humanised and drawn together by misery, were becoming acquainted. The incessant murmur of thei

r than they had looked when they embarked. Domini saw them march away up the hill. They still clung to their bags and bundles. Some of them, lifting shaky voices, tried to sing in chorus. One of the Zouaves angrily shouted to t

wed up in it for the winter. Yet how many winters she had spent there, dreaming of liberty and doing dreary things-things without savour, without meaning, without salvation for brain or soul. Her mind was still dulled to a certain extent by the narcotic she had taken. She was a strong and active woman, with long limbs and well-knit muscles, a clever fencer, a tireless swimmer, a fine horsewoman. But to-night she felt almost neurotic, like one of the weak or dissipated sisterhood for whom "rest cures" are invented, and by whom bland doctors live. That heaving red floor continually emphasised for her her present feebleness. She hated feebleness. So she blew out the candle and, with

veil over an immense surface. She got up, walked across the floor to the open window and unfastened the persiennes. Heavy rain was falling. The night was very black, and smelt rich and damp, as if it held in its arms strange offerings-a merchandise al

wanted the nomad's fires and the acid voices of the Kabyle dogs. She wanted the roar of the tom-toms, the dash of the cymbals, the rattle of the negroes' castanets, the fluttering, painted f

he rain and the scents coming up out of the hidden earth of Africa had carried her

t prominent and ardent English Catholics of his day. A son of his became a priest, and a famous preacher and writer on religious subjects. Another child, a daughter, took the veil. Lady Rens, who was not clever, although she was at one time almost universally considered to have the face of a muse, shared in the family ardour for the Church, but was far too fond of the world to leave it. While she was very youn

her principles to the winds, and ran away with a Hungarian musician, who had made a furor one season in London by his magnificent violin-playing, her husban

ost miserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of her mother's dark beauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence and passion, was also gifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of temperament and clearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even when she was still quivering under the shock and shame of her mother's guilt and her own solitude, Domini was unable to share her father's intensely egoistic view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that the faith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham because one of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and t

by her mother's desertion and its effect upon her father. She remained a Catholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout one. Although she had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been shaken, if not in her belief, in a more precious thing-her love. She complied with the ordinances, but felt little of the inner beauty of her faith. The effort she had made in withstanding her father's assault upon it had exhausted her. Though she had had the strength to triumph, at the moment,

er home was far from ideal. Yet she would not marry. The wreck of her parents' domestic life had rendered her mistrustful of human relations. She had seen something of the terror of love, and could not, like other women, regard it as

ng period, long though it had been and ugly, was blotted out. She wept for the poor, broken life now ended, and was afraid for his future in the other world. His departure into the unknown roused her abruptly to a clear conception of how his action and her mother's had affected her own character. As she stood by his bed she wondered what she might have been if her mother had been true, her father happy, to the end. Then she felt afraid of herself, recognising partially, and for the first time, how all these years had seen her long indifference. She felt self-conscious too, ignorant of the real meaning of life, and as if she had always been, and

oasis in the Sahara Desert, because she knew it was small, quiet, yet face to face with an immensity of which she had often dreamed. Idly she fancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far from all the friends and reminiscences of her old life, she might learn to understand herself. How? She did not know. She did not seek to know. He