Domini’s acquaintance with Androvsky had not progressed as easily and pleasantly as her intercourse with Count Anteoni.  She recognised that he was what is called a “difficult man.”  Now and then, as if under the prompting influence of some secret and violent emotion, he spoke with apparent naturalness, spoke perhaps out of his heart.  Each time he did so she noticed that there was something of either doubt or amazement in what he said.  She gathered that he was slow to rely, quick to mistrust.  She gathered, too, that very many things surprised him, and felt sure that he hid nearly all of them from her, and would—­had not his own will sometimes betrayed him—­have hidden all.  His reserve was as intense as everything about him.  There was a fierceness in it that revealed its existence.  He always conveyed to her a feeling of strength, physical and mental.  Yet he always conveyed, too, a feeling of uneasiness.  To a woman of Domini’s temperament uneasiness usually implies a public or secret weakness.  In Androvsky’s she seemed to be aware of passion, as if it were one to dash obstacles aside, to break through doors of iron, to rush out into the open.  And then—­what then?  To tremble at the world before him?  At what he had done?  She did not know.  But she did know that even in his uneasiness there seemed to be fibre, muscle, sinew, nerve—­all which goes to make strength, swiftness.

Speech was singularly difficult to him.  Silence seemed to be natural, not irksome.  After a few words he fell into it and remained in it.  And he was less self-conscious in silence than in speech.  He seemed, she fancied, to feel himself safer, more a man when he was not speaking.  To him the use of words was surely like a yielding.

He had a peculiar faculty of making his presence felt when he was silent, as if directly he ceased from speaking the flame in him was fanned and leaped up at the outside world beyond its bars.

She did not know whether he was a gentleman or not.

If anyone had asked her, before she came to Beni-Mora, whether it would be possible for her to take four solitary rides with a man, to meet him—­if only for a few minutes—­every day of ten days, to sit opposite to him, and not far from him, at meals during the same space of time, and to be unable to say to herself whether he was or was not a gentleman by birth and education—­feeling set aside—­she would have answered without hesitation that it would be utterly impossible.  Yet so it was.  She could not decide.  She could not place him.  She could not imagine what his parentage, what his youth, his manhood had been.  She could not fancy him in any environment—­save that golden light, that blue radiance, in which she had first consciously and fully met him face to face.  She could not hear him in converse with any set of men or women, or invent, in her mind, what he might be likely to say to them.  She could not conceive him bound by any ties of home, or family, mother, sister, wife, child.  When she looked at him, thought about him, he presented himself to her alone, like a thing in the air.