As the throb of the engine grew faint a figure in European clothes and a long-tasselled chechia crept out from the dark of a door arch along the street.  It advanced toward the gate.  It started back at a sound.  It rallied again, a figure bedeviled by vacillation.  It came as far as the well in the centre of the little square.

On the horizon toward the coast of Sousse rested a low black wall of cloud.  Lightning came out of it from time to time and ran up the sky, soundless, glimmering....  The cry of the morning muezzin rolled down over the town.  The lightning showed the figure sprawled face down on the cool stone of the coping of the well....

The court of the house of bel-Kalfate swam in the glow of candles.  A striped awning shut out the night sky, heavy with clouds, and the women, crowding for stolen peeps on the flat roof.  A confusion of voices, raillery, laughter, eddied around the arcaded walls, and thin music bound it together with a monotonous count of notes.

Through the doorway from the marble entresol where he stood Habib could see his father, cross-legged on a dais, with the notary.  They sat hand in hand like big children, conversing gravely.  With them was the caid of Kairwan, the cadi, ben Iskhar, and a dark-skinned cousin from the oases of the Djerid in the south.  Their garments shone; there was perfume in their beards.  On a rostrum beyond and above the crowded heads the musicians swayed at their work—­tabouka players with strong, nervous thumbs; an oily, gross lutist; an organist, watching everything with the lizard eyes of the hashish taker.  Among them, behind a taborette piled with bait of food and drink, the Jewish dancing woman from Algiers lolled in her cushions, a drift of white disdain....

He saw it all through a kind of mist.  It was as if time had halted, and he was still at the steaming hammam of the afternoon, his spirit and his flesh undone, and all about him in the perfumed vapour of the bath the white bodies of his boyhood comrades glimmering luminous and opalescent.

His flesh was still asleep, and so was his soul.  The hand of his father city had come closer about him, and for a moment it seemed that he was too weary, or too lazy, to push it away.  For a little while he drifted with the warm and perfumed cloud of the hours.

Hands turned him around.  It was Houseen Abdelkader, the caid’s son, the comrade of long ago—­Houseen in silk of wine and silver, hyacinths pendent on his cheeks, a light of festival in his eyes.

“Es-selam alekoum, ya Habib habiby!” It was the salutation in the plural—­to Habib, and to the angels that walk, one at either shoulder of every son of God.  And as he spoke he threw a new white burnoose over Habib’s head, so that it hung down straight and covered him like a bridal veil.

“Alekoum selam, ya Seenou!” It was the name of boyhood, Seenou, the diminutive, that fell from Habib’s lips.  And he could not call it back.