“Thou art in well-being?”

“There is no ill.  And thou?”

“There is no ill.  That the praise be to God, and the prayer!”

Bel-Kalfate cleared his throat and lifted the reins from the neck of his mare.

“Rest in well-being!” he pronounced.

Raoul shrugged his shoulders a little and murmured:  “May God multiply thy days!...  And yours, too,” he added to Habib in French.  He bowed and took his leave.

Bel-Kalfate watched him away through the thinning crowd, sitting his saddle stolidly, in an attitude of rumination.  When the blue cap had vanished behind the blazing corner of the wool dyers, he threw the reins to his Sudanese stirrup boy and got down to the ground.  He took his son’s hand.  So, palm in palm, at a grave pace, they walked back under the arch into the city.  The market-going stream was nearly done.  The tide, against which at its flood Habib had fought and won ground, carried him down again with its last shallow wash—­so easily!

His nerves had gone slack.  He walked in a heavy white dream.  The city drew him deeper into its murmurous heart.  The walls pressed closer and hid him away.  The souks swallowed him under their shadowy arcades.  The breath of the bazaar, fetor of offal, stench of raw leather, and all the creeping perfumes of Barbary, attar of roses, chypre and amber and musk, clogged his senses like the drug of some abominable seduction.  He was weary, weary, weary.  And in a strange, troubling way he was at rest.

“Mektoub!  It is written!  It is written in the book of the destiny of man!”

With a kind of hypnotic fascination, out of the corners of his eyes, he took stock of the face beside him, the face of the strange being that was his father—­the broad, moist, unmarked brow; the large eyes, heavy-lidded, serene; the full-fleshed cheeks from which the beard sprang soft and rank, and against which a hyacinth, pendent over the ear, showed with a startling purity of pallor; and the mobile, deep-coloured, humid lips—­the lips of the voluptuary, the eyes of the dreamer, the brow of the man of never-troubled faith.

“Am I like that?” And then, “What can that one be to me?”

As if in answer, bel-Kalfate’s gaze came to his son.

“I love thee,” he said, and he kissed Habib’s temple with his lips.  “Thou art my son,” he went on, “and my eyes were thirsty to drink of the sight of thee.  It is el jammaa.” [Friday, the Mohammedan Sabbath.] “It is time we should go to the prayer.  We shall go with Hadji Daoud to-day, for afterward, there at the mosque, I have rendezvous with his friends, in the matter of the dowry.  It is the day, thou rememberest, that he appointed.”

Habib wanted to stop.  He wanted to think.  He wanted time.  But the serene, warm pressure of his father’s hand carried him on.

Stammering words fell from his mouth.

“My mother—­I remember—­my mother, it is true, said something—­but I did not altogether comprehend—­and—­Oh! my sire ——­”