“Our wedding breakfast!” Domini said under her breath.

She felt just then as if she were living in a wonderful romance.

They sat down side by side and ate with a good appetite, served by Batouch and Ali.  Now and then a pale yellow butterfly, yellow as the sand, flitted by them.  Small yellow birds with crested heads ran swiftly among the scrub, or flew low over the flats.  In the sky the vapours gathered themselves together and moved slowly away towards the east, leaving the blue above their heads unflecked with white.  With each moment the heat of the sun grew more intense.  The wind had gone.  It was difficult to believe that it had ever roared over the desert.  A little way from them the camel-drivers squatted beside the beasts, eating flat loaves of yellow bread, and talking together in low, guttural voices.  The guard dogs roamed round them, uneasily hungry.  In the distance, before a tent of patched rags, a woman, scantily clad in bright red cotton, was suckling a child and staring at the caravan.

Domini and Androvsky scarcely spoke as they ate.  Once she said: 

“Do you realise that this is a wedding breakfast?”

She was thinking of the many wedding receptions she had attended in London, of crowds of smartly-dressed women staring enviously at tiaras, and sets of jewels arranged in cases upon tables, of brides and bridegrooms, looking flushed and anxious, standing under canopies of flowers and forcing their tired lips into smiles as they replied to stereotyped congratulations, while detectives—­poorly disguised as gentlemen—­hovered in the back-ground to see that none of the presents mysteriously disappeared.  Her presents were the velvety roses in the earthen vases, the breezes of the desert, the sand humps, the yellow butterflies, the silence that lay around like a blessing pronounced by the God who made the still places where souls can learn to know themselves and their great destiny.

“A wedding breakfast,” Androvsky said.

“Yes.  But perhaps you have never been to one.”

“Never.”

“Then you can’t love this one as much as I do.”

“Much more,” he answered.

She looked at him, remembering how often in the past, when she had been feeling intensely, she had it borne in upon her that he was feeling even more intensely than herself.  But could that be possible now?

“Do you think,” she said, “that it is possible for you, who have never lived in cities, to love this land as I love it?”

Androvsky moved on his cushion and leaned down till his elbow touched the sand.  Lying thus, with his chin in his hand, and his eyes fixed upon her, he answered: 

“But it is not the land I am loving.”

His absolute concentration upon her made her think that, perhaps, he misunderstood her meaning in speaking of the desert, her joy in it.  She longed to explain how he and the desert were linked together in her heart, and she dropped her hand upon his left hand, which lay palm downwards in the warm sand.