“Where will you be?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.  I won’t think of the afterwards now, in these last few hours—­in these last——­”

Her voice faltered and broke.  Then the tears came to her also, and for a while she could not see the distant lights.

Then she spoke again; she said: 

“Boris, let us go now.”

He got up without a word.  They found the carriage and drove back to Tunis.

When they reached the hotel they came into the midst of the American tourists, who were excitedly discussing the dances they had seen, and calling for cooling drinks to allay the thirst created by the heat of the close rooms of Oriental houses.

Early next morning a carriage was at the door.  When they had got into it the coachman looked round.

“Where shall I drive to, Monsieur?”

Androvsky looked at him and made no reply.

“To El-Largani,” Domini said.

“To the monastery, Madame?”

He whistled to his horses gaily.  As they trotted on bells chimed about their necks, chimed a merry peal to the sunshine that lay over the land.  They passed soldiers marching, and heard the call of bugles, the rattle of drums.  And each sound seemed distant and each moving figure far away.  This world of Africa, fiercely distinct in the clear air under the cloudless sky, was unreal to them both, was vague as a northern land wrapped in a mist of autumn.  The unreal was about them.  Within themselves was the real.  They sat beside each other without speaking.  Words to them now were useless things.  What more had they to say?  Everything and nothing.  Lifetimes would not have been long enough for them to speak their thoughts for each other, of each other, to speak their emotions, all that was in their minds and hearts during that drive from the city to the monastery that stood upon the hill.  Yet did not their mutual action of that morning say all that need be said?  The silence of the Trappists surely floated out to them over the plains and the pale waters of the bitter lakes and held them silent.

But the bells on the horses’ necks rang always gaily, and the coachman, who would presently drive Domini back alone to Tunis, whistled and sang on his high seat.

Presently they came to a great wooden cross standing on a pedestal of stone by the roadside at the edge of a grove of olive trees.  It marked the beginning of the domain of El-Largani.  When Domini saw it she looked at Androvsky, and his eyes answered her silent question.  The coachman whipped his horses into a canter, as if he were in haste to reach his destination.  He was thinking of the good red wine of the monks.  In a cloud of white dust the carriage rolled onwards between vineyards in which, here and there, labourers were working, sheltered from the sun by immense straw hats.  A long line of waggons, laden with barrels and drawn by mules covered with bells, sheltered from the flies by leaves, met them.