“I can scarcely believe that,” she answered bluntly.

They looked at each other.

“Why not, Madame?” he said.  “If I say it is so?”

She hesitated.  At that moment she realised, with hot astonishment, that there was something in this man that could make her almost afraid, that could prevent her even, perhaps, from doing the thing she had resolved to do.  Immediately she felt hostile to him, and she knew that, at that moment, he was feeling hostile to her.

“If you say it is so naturally I am bound to take your word for it,” she said coldly.

He flushed and looked down.  The rigid defiance that had confronted her died out of his face.

Honest Mustapha broke joyously upon them with the coffee.  Domini helped Androvsky to it.  She had to make a great effort to perform this simple act with quiet, and apparently indifferent, composure.

“Thank you, Madame.”

His voice sounded humble, but she felt hard and as if ice were in all her veins.  She sipped her coffee, looking straight before her at the stream.  The magenta robe appeared once more coming out from the brown wall.  A yellow robe succeeded it, a scarlet, a deep purple.  The girl, with three curious young companions, stood in the sun examining the foreigners with steady, unflinching eyes.  Domini smiled grimly.  Fate gave her an opportunity.  She beckoned to the girls.  They looked at each other but did not move.  She held up a bit of silver so that the sun was on it, and beckoned them again.  The magenta robe was lifted above the pretty knees it had covered.  The yellow, the scarlet, the deep purple robes rose too, making their separate revelations.  And the four girls, all staring at the silver coin, waded through the muddy water and stood before Domini and Androvsky, blotting out the glaring sunshine with their young figures.  Their smiling faces were now eager and confident, and they stretched out their delicate hands hopefully to the silver.  Domini signified that they must wait a moment.

She felt full of malice.

The girls wore many ornaments.  She began slowly and deliberately to examine them; the huge gold earrings that were as large as the little ears that sustained them, the bracelets and anklets, the triangular silver skewers that fastened the draperies across the gentle swelling breasts, the narrow girdles, worked with gold thread, and hung with lumps of coral, that circled the small, elastic waists.  Her inventory was an adagio, and while it lasted Androvsky sat on his low straw chair with this wall of young womanhood before him, of young womanhood no longer self-conscious and timid, but eager, hardy, natural, warm with the sun and damp with the trickling drops of the water.  The vivid draperies touched him, and presently a little hand stole out to his breast, caught at the silver chain that lay across it, and jerked out of its hiding-place—­a wooden cross.

Domini saw the light on it for a second, heard a low, fierce exclamation, saw Androvsky’s arm push the pretty hand roughly away, and then a thing that was strange.