“And I pay him so much a week all the year round for doing that,” the Count said.

His grating voice sounded kind and amused.  They walked on, and Larbi’s tune died gradually away.

“Somehow I can’t be angry with the follies and vices of the Arabs,” the Count continued.  “I love them as they are; idle, absurdly amorous, quick to shed blood, gay as children, whimsical as—­well, Madame, were I talking to a man I might dare to say pretty women.”

“Why not?”

“I will, then.  I glory in their ingrained contempt of civilisation.  But I like them to say their prayers five times in the day as it is commanded, and no Arab who touches alcohol in defiance of the Prophet’s law sets foot in my garden.”

There was a touch of harshness in his voice as he said the last words, the sound of the autocrat.  Somehow Domini liked it.  This man had convictions, and strong ones.  That was certain.  There was something oddly unconventional in him which something in her responded to.  He was perfectly polite, and yet, she was quite sure, absolutely careless of opinion.  Certainly he was very much a man.

“It is pleasant, too,” he resumed, after a slight pause, “to be surrounded by absolutely thoughtless people with thoughtful faces and mysterious eyes—­wells without truth at the bottom of them.”

She laughed.

“No one must think here but you!”

“I prefer to keep all the folly to myself.  Is not that a grand cocoanut?”

He pointed to a tree so tall that it seemed soaring to heaven.

“Yes, indeed.  Like the one that presides over the purple dog.”

“You have seen my fetish?”

“Smain showed him to me, with reverence.”

“Oh, he is king here.  The Arabs declare that on moonlight nights they have heard him joining in the chorus of the Kabyle dogs.”

“You speak almost as if you believed it.”

“Well, I believe more here than I believe anywhere else.  That is partly why I come here.”

“I can understand that—­I mean believing much here.”

“What!  Already you feel the spell of Beni-Mora, the desert spell!  Yes, there is enchantment here—­and so I never stay too long.”

“For fear of what?”

Count Anteoni was walking easily beside her.  He walked from the hips, like many Sicilians, swaying very slightly, as if he liked to be aware how supple his body still was.  As Domini spoke he stopped.  They were now at a place where four paths joined, and could see four vistas of green and gold, of magical sunlight and shadow.

“I scarcely know; of being carried who knows where—­in mind or heart.  Oh, there is danger in Beni-Mora, Madame, there is danger.  This startling air is full of influences, of desert spirits.”

He looked at her in a way she could not understand—­but it made her think of the perfume-seller in his little dark room, and of the sudden sensation she had had that mystery coils, like a black serpent, in the shining heart of the East.