leaves the passing of the caravans along the desert tracks.  Sometimes a little wreath of ascending smoke, curling above the purple petals of bougainvilleas, or the red cloud of oleanders, told her of his presence, in some retired thinking-place.  Oftener he joined her, with an easy politeness that did not conceal his oddity, but clothed it in a pleasant garment, and they talked for a while or stayed for a while in an agreeable silence that each felt to be sympathetic.

Domini thought of him as a new species of man—­a hermit of the world.  He knew the world and did not hate it.  His satire was rarely quite ungentle.  He did not strike her as a disappointed man who fled to solitude in bitterness of spirit, but rather as an imaginative man with an unusual feeling for romance, and perhaps a desire for freedom that the normal civilised life restrained too much.  He loved thought as many love conversation, silence as some love music.  Now and then he said a sad or bitter thing.  Sometimes she seemed to be near to something stern.  Sometimes she felt as if there were a secret link which connected him with the perfume-seller in his little darkened chamber, with the legions who prayed about the tomb of Sidi-Zerzour.  But these moments were rare.  As a rule he was whimsical and kind, with the kindness of a good-hearted man who was human even in his detachment from ordinary humanity.  His humour was a salt with plenty of savour.  His imagination was of a sort which interested and even charmed her.

She felt, too, that she interested him and that he was a man not readily interested in ordinary human beings.  He had seen too many and judged too shrewdly and too swiftly to be easily held for very long.  She had no ambition to hold him, and had never in her life consciously striven to attract or retain any man, but she was woman enough to find his obvious pleasure in her society agreeable.  She thought that her genuine adoration of the garden he had made, of the land in which it was set, had not a little to do with the happy nature of their intercourse.  For she felt certain that beneath the light satire of his manner, his often smiling airs of detachment and quiet independence, there was something that could seek almost with passion, that could cling with resolution, that could even love with persistence.  And she fancied that he sought in the desert, that he clung to its mystery, that he loved it and the garden he had created in it.  Once she had laughingly called him a desert spirit.  He had smiled as if with contentment.

They knew little of each other, yet they had become friends in the garden which he never left.

One day she said to him: 

“You love the desert.  Why do you never go into it?”

“I prefer to watch it,” he relied.  “When you are in the desert it bewilders you.”

She remembered what she had felt during her first ride with Androvsky.

“I believe you are afraid of it,” she said challengingly.