“And now, Madame, which path shall we take?  This one leads to my drawing-room, that on the right to the Moorish bath.”

“And that?”

“That one goes straight down to the wall that overlooks the Sahara.”

“Please let us take it.”

“The desert spirits are calling to you?  But you are wise.  What makes this garden remarkable is not its arrangement, the number and variety of its trees, but the fact that it lies flush with the Sahara—­like a man’s thoughts of truth with Truth, perhaps.”

He turned up the tail of the sentence and his harsh voice gave a little grating crack.

“I don’t believe they are so different from one another as the garden and the desert.”

She looked at him directly.

“It would be too ironical.”

“But nothing is,” the Count said.

“You have discovered that in this garden?”

“Ah, it is new to you, Madame!”

For the first time there was a sound of faint bitterness in his voice.

“One often discovers the saddest thing in the loveliest place,” he added.  “There you begin to see the desert.”

Far away, at the small orifice of the tunnel of trees down which they were walking, appeared a glaring patch of fierce and quivering sunlight.

“I can only see the sun,” Domini said.

“I know so well what it hides that I imagine I actually see the desert.  One loves one’s kind, assiduous liar.  Isn’t it so?”

“The imagination?  But perhaps I am not disposed to allow that it is a liar.”

“Who knows?  You may be right.”

He looked at her kindly with his bright eyes.  It had not seem to strike him that their conversation was curiously intimate, considering that they were strangers to one another, that he did not even know her name.  Domini wondered suddenly how old he was.  That look made him seem much older than he had seemed before.  There was such an expression in his eyes as may sometimes be seen in eyes that look at a child who is kissing a rag doll with deep and determined affection.  “Kiss your doll!” they seemed to say.  “Put off the years when you must know that dolls can never return a kiss.”

“I begin to see the desert now,” Domini said after a moment of silent walking.  “How wonderful it is!”

“Yes, it is.  The most wonderful thing in Nature.  You will think it much more wonderful when you fancy you know it well.”

“Fancy!”

“I don’t think anyone can ever really know the desert.  It is the thing that keeps calling, and does not permit one to draw near.”

“But then, one might learn to hate it.”

“I don’t think so.  Truth does just the same, you know.  And yet men keep on trying to draw near.”

“But sometimes they succeed.”

“Do they?  Not when they live in gardens.”

He laughed for the first time since they had been together, and all his face was covered with a network of little moving lines.