“But you come here every day?” he said.

“I!”

“Yes.  Has he ever seen you?”

“Larbi?  Often.  What has that to do with it?”

He did not reply.

Odd and disconnected as Larbi’s melodies were, they created an atmosphere of wild tenderness.  Spontaneously they bubbled up out of the heart of the Eastern world and, when the player was invisible as now, suggested an ebon faun couched in hot sand at the foot of a palm tree and making music to listening sunbeams and amorous spirits of the waste.

“Do you like it?” she said presently in an under voice.

“Yes, Madame.  And you?”

“I love it, but not as I love the song of the freed negroes.  That is a song of all the secrets of humanity and of the desert too.  And it does not try to tell them.  It only says that they exist and that God knows them.  But, I remember, you do not like that song.”

“Madame,” he answered slowly, and as if he were choosing his words, “I see that you understood.  The song did move me though I said not.  But no, I do not like it.”

“Do you care to tell me why?”

“Such a song as that seems to me an—­it is like an intrusion.  There are things that should be let alone.  There are dark places that should be left dark.”

“You mean that all human beings hold within them secrets, and that no allusion even should ever be made to those secrets?”

“Yes.”

“I understand.”

After a pause he said, anxiously, she thought: 

“Am I right, Madame, or is my thought ridiculous?”

He asked it so simply that she felt touched.

“I’m sure you could never be ridiculous,” she said quickly.  “And perhaps you are right.  I don’t know.  That song makes me think and feel, and so I love it.  Perhaps if you heard it alone—­”

“Then I should hate it,” he interposed.

His voice was like an uncontrolled inner voice speaking.

“And not thought and feeling—­” she began.

But he interrupted her.

“They make all the misery that exists in the world.”

“And all the happiness.”

“Do they?”

“They must.”

“Then you want to think deeply, to feel deeply?”

“Yes.  I would rather be the central figure of a world-tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost, even if it were sorrow.  My whole nature revolts against the idea of being able to feel little or nothing really.  It seems to me that when we begin to feel acutely we begin to grow, like the palm tree rising towards the African sun.”

“I do not think you have ever been very unhappy,” he said.  The sound of his voice as he said it made her suddenly feel as if it were true, as if she had never been utterly unhappy.  Yet she had never been really happy.  Africa had taught her that.

“Perhaps not,” she answered.  “But—­some day—­”

She stopped.