The bell of the church near by chimed softly, and the familiar sound fell strangely upon Domini’s ears out here in Africa, reminding her of many sorrows. Her religion was linked with terrible memories, with cruel struggles, with hateful scenes of violence. Lord Rens had been a man of passionate temperament. Strong in goodness when he had been led by love, he had been equally strong in evil when hate had led him. Domini had been forced to contemplate at close quarters the raw character of a warped man, from whom circumstance had stripped all tenderness, nearly all reticence. The terror of truth was known to her. She had shuddered before it, but she had been obliged to watch it during many years. In coming to Beni-Mora she had had a sort of vague, and almost childish, feeling that she was putting the broad sea between herself and it. Yet before she had started it had been buried in the grave. She never wished to behold such truth again. She wanted to look upon some other truth of life--the truth of beauty, of calm, of freedom. Lord Rens had always been a slave, the slave of love, most of all when he was filled with hatred, and Domini, influenced by his example, instinctively connected love with a chain. Only the love a human being has for God seemed to her sometimes the finest freedom; the movement of the soul upward into the infinite obedient to the call of the great Liberator. The love of man for woman, of woman for man, she thought of as imprisonment, bondage. Was not her mother a slave to the man who had wrecked her life and carried her spirit beyond the chance of heaven? Was not her father a slave to her mother? She shrank definitely from the contemplation of herself loving, with all the strength she suspected in her heart, a human being. In her religion only she had felt in rare moments something of love. And now here, in this tremendous and conquering land, she felt a divine stirring in her love for Nature. For that afternoon Nature, so often calm and meditative, or gently indifferent, as one too complete to be aware of those who lack completeness, had impetuously summoned her to worship, had ardently appealed to her for something more than a temperate watchfulness or a sober admiration. There had been a most definite demand made upon her. Even in her fatigue and in this dreamy twilight she was conscious of a latent excitement that was not lulled to sleep. And as she sat there, while the darkness grew in the sky and spread secretly along the sandy rills among the trees, she wondered how much she held within her to give in answer to this cry to her of self-confident Nature. Was it only a little? She did not know. Perhaps she was too tired to know. But however much it was it must seem meagre. What is even a woman’s heart given to the desert or a woman’s soul to the sea? What is the worship of anyone to the sunset among the hills, or to the wind that lifts all the clouds from before the face of the moon?