“Yes, and I have noticed it in our dead Cardinal.”

“Cardinal Lavigerie.”

Androvsky bent over his plate.  He seemed suddenly to withdraw his mind forcibly from this conversation in which he was taking no active part, as if he refused even to listen to it.

“He is your hero, I know,” the Count said sympathetically.

“He did a great deal for me.”

“And for Africa.  And he was wise.”

“You mean in some special way?” Domini said.

“Yes.  He looked deep enough into the dark souls of the desert men to find out that his success with them must come chiefly through his goodness to their dark bodies.  You aren’t shocked, Father?”

“No, no.  There is truth in that.”

But the priest assented rather sadly.

“Mahomet thought too much of the body,” he added.

Domini saw the Count compress his lips.  Then he turned to Androvsky and said: 

“Do you think so, Monsieur?”

It was a definite, a resolute attempt to draw his guest into the conversation.  Androvsky could not ignore it.  He looked up reluctantly from his plate.  His eyes met Domini’s, but immediately travelled away from them.

“I doubt——­” he said.

He paused, laid his hands on the table, clasping its edge, and continued firmly, even with a sort of hard violence: 

“I doubt if most good men, or men who want to be good, think enough about the body, consider it enough.  I have thought that.  I think it still.”

As he finished he stared at the priest, almost menacingly.  Then, as if moved by an after-thought, he added: 

“As to Mahomet, I know very little about him.  But perhaps he obtained his great influence by recognising that the bodies of men are of great importance, of tremendous—­tremendous importance.”

Domini saw that the interest of Count Anteoni in his guest was suddenly and vitally aroused by what he had just said, perhaps even more by his peculiar way of saying it, as if it were forced from him by some secret, irresistible compulsion.  And the Count’s interest seemed to take hands with her interest, which had had a much longer existence.  Father Roubier, however, broke in with a slightly cold: 

“It is a very dangerous thing, I think, to dwell upon the importance of the perishable.  One runs the risk of detracting from the much greater importance of the imperishable.”

“Yet it’s the starved wolves that devour the villages,” said Androvsky.

For the first time Domini felt his Russian origin.  There was a silence.  Father Roubier looked straight before him, but Count Anteoni’s eyes were fixed piercingly upon Androvsky.  At last he said: 

“May I ask, Monsieur, if you are a Russian?”

“My father was.  But I have never set foot in Russia.”

“The soul that I find in the art, music, literature of your country is, to me, the most interesting soul in Europe,” the Count said with a ring of deep earnestness in his grating voice.