Spoken as he spoke it, no compliment could have been more gracious, even moving.  But Androvsky only replied abruptly: 

“I’m afraid I know nothing of all that.”

Domini felt hot with a sort of shame, as at a close friend’s public display of ignorance.  She began to speak to the Count of Russian music, books, with an enthusiasm that was sincere.  For she, too, had found in the soul from the Steppes a meaning and a magic that had taken her soul prisoner.  And suddenly, while she talked, she thought of the Desert as the burning brother of the frigid Steppes.  Was it the wonder of the eternal flats that had spoken to her inmost heart sometimes in London concert-rooms, in her room at night when she read, forgetting time, which spoke to her now more fiercely under the palms of Africa?  At the thought something mystic seemed to stand in her enthusiasm.  The mystery of space floated about her.  But she did not express her thought.  Count Anteoni expressed it for her.

“The Steppes and the Desert are akin, you know,” he said.  “Despite the opposition of frost and fire.”

“Just what I was thinking!” she exclaimed.  “That must be why—­”

She stopped short.

“Yes?” said the Count.

Both Father Roubier and Androvsky looked at her with expectancy.  But she did not continue her sentence, and her failure to do so was covered, or at the least excused, by a diversion that secretly she blessed.  At this moment, from the ante-room, there came a sound of African music, both soft and barbarous.  First there was only one reiterated liquid note, clear and glassy, a note that suggested night in a remote place.  Then, beneath it, as foundation to it, rose a rustling sound as of a forest of reeds through which a breeze went rhythmically.  Into this stole the broken song of a thin instrument with a timbre rustic and antique as the timbre of the oboe, but fainter, frailer.  A twang of softly-plucked strings supported its wild and pathetic utterance, and presently the almost stifled throb of a little tomtom that must have been placed at a distance.  It was like a beating heart.

The Count and his guests sat listening in silence.  Domini began to feel curiously expectant, yet she did not recognise the odd melody.  Her sensation was that some other music must be coming which she had heard before, which had moved her deeply at some time in her life.  She glanced at the Count and found him looking at her with a whimsical expression, as if he were a kind conspirator whose plot would soon be known.

“What is it?” she asked in a low voice.

He bent towards her.

“Wait!” he whispered.  “Listen!”

She saw Androvsky frown.  His face was distorted by an expression of pain, and she wondered if he, like some Europeans, found the barbarity of the desert music ugly and even distressing to the nerves.  While she wondered a voice began to sing, always accompanied by the four instruments.  It was a contralto voice, but sounded like a youth’s.