He went on, and she stood for a few minutes looking at the blaze of the fire, and at the faces lit up by it, French and Arab.  The happy soldiers were singing a French song with a chorus for the delectation of the Arabs, who swayed to and fro, wagging their heads and smiling in an effort to show appreciation of the barbarous music of the Roumis.  Dreary, terrible Mogar and its influences were being defied by the wanderers halting in it.  She thought of Androvsky’s words about the human will overcoming the influence of place, and a sudden desire came to her to go as far as the tower where she had felt sad and apprehensive, to stand in its shadow for an instant and to revel in her happiness.

She yielded to the impulse, walked to the tower, and stood there facing the darkness which hid the dunes, the white plains, the phantom sea, seeing them in her mind, and radiantly defying them.  Then she began to return to the camp, walking lightly, as happy people walk.  When she had gone a very short way she heard someone coming towards her.  It was too dark to see who it was.  She could only hear the steps among the stones.  They were hasty.  They passed her and stopped behind her at the tower.  She wondered who it was, and supposed it must be one of the soldiers come to fetch something, or perhaps tired and hastening to bed.

As she drew near to the camp she saw the lamplight shining in the tent, where doubtless De Trevignac and Androvsky were smoking and talking in frank good fellowship.  It was like a bright star, she thought, that gleam of light that shone out of her home, the brightest of all the stars of Africa.  She went towards it.  As she drew near she expected to hear the voices of the two men, but she heard nothing.  Nor did she see the blackness of their forms in the circle of the light.  Perhaps they had gone out to join the soldiers and the Arabs round the fire.  She hastened on, came to the tent, entered it, and was confronted by her husband, who was standing back in an angle formed by the canvas, in the shadow, alone.  On the floor near him lay a quantity of fragments of glass.

“Boris!” she said.  “Where is Monsieur de Trevignac?”

“Gone,” replied Androvsky in a loud, firm voice.

She looked up at him.  His face was grim and powerful, hard like the face of a fighting man.

“Gone already?  Why?”

“He’s tired out.  He told me to make his excuses to you.”

“But——­”

She saw in the table the coffee cups.  Two of them were full of coffee.  The third, hers, was clean.

“But he hasn’t drunk his coffee!” she said.

She was astonished and showed it.  She could not understand a man who had displayed such warm, even touching, appreciation of her kindness leaving her without a word, taking the opportunity of her momentary absence to disappear, to shirk away—­for she put it like that to herself.

“No—­he did not want coffee.”