“I come here to be foolish, Madame, for I come here to think.  This is my special thinking place.”

“How strange!” Domini exclaimed impulsively, and leaning forward on the divan.

“Is it?”

“I only mean that already Beni-Mora has seemed to me the ideal place for that.”

“For thought?”

“For finding out interior truth.”

Count Anteoni looked at her rather swiftly and searchingly.  His eyes were not large, but they were bright, and held none of the languor so often seen in the eyes of his countrymen.  His face was expressive through its mobility rather than through its contours.  The features were small and refined, not noble, but unmistakably aristocratic.  The nose was sensitive, with wide nostrils.  A long and straight moustache, turning slightly grey, did not hide the mouth, which had unusually pale lips.  The ears were set very flat against the head, and were finely shaped.  The chin was pointed.  The general look of the whole face was tense, critical, conscious, but in the defiant rather than in the timid sense.  Such an expression belongs to men who would always be aware of the thoughts and feelings of others concerning them, but who would throw those thoughts and feelings off as decisively and energetically as a dog shakes the waterdrops from its coat on emerging from a swim.

“And sending it forth, like Ishmael, to shift for itself in the desert,” he said.

The odd remark sounded like neither statement nor question, merely like the sudden exclamation of a mind at work.

“Will you allow me to take you through the rest of the garden, Madame?” he added in a more formal voice.

“Thank you,” said Domini, who had already got up, moved by the examining look cast at her.

There was nothing in it to resent, and she had not resented it, but it had recalled her to the consciousness that they were utter strangers to each other.

As they came out on the pale riband of sand which circled the little room Domini said: 

“How wild and extraordinary that tune is!”

“Larbi’s.  I suppose it is, but no African music seems strange to me.  I was born on my father’s estate, near Tunis.  He was a Sicilian; but came to North Africa each winter.  I have always heard the tomtoms and the pipes, and I know nearly all the desert songs of the nomads.”

“This is a love-song, isn’t it?”

“Yes.  Larbi is always in love, they tell me.  Each new dancer catches him in her net.  Happy Larbi!”

“Because he can love so easily?”

“Or unlove so easily.  Look at him, Madame.”

At a little distance, under a big banana tree, and half hidden by clumps of scarlet geraniums, Domini saw a huge and very ugly Arab, with an almost black skin, squatting on his heels, with a long yellow and red flute between his thick lips.  His eyes were bent down, and he did not see them, but went on busily playing, drawing from his flute coquettish phrases with his big and bony fingers.