Looking up thus with a kind of severe determination, she saw the man again.  He was eating and was not looking towards her, and she fancied that his eyes were downcast with as much conscious resolution as hers had been a moment before.  He wore the same suit as he had worn in the train, but now it was flecked with desert dust.  She could not “place” him at all.  He was not of the small, fat man’s order.  They would have nothing in common.  With the French officers?  She could not imagine how he would be with them.  The only other man in the room—­the servant had gone out for the moment—­was the priest.  He and the priest—­they would surely be antagonists.  Had he not turned aside to avoid the priest in the tunnel?  Probably he was one of those many men who actively hate the priesthood, to whom the soutane is anathema.  Could he find pleasant companionship with such a man as Count Anteoni, an original man, no doubt, but also a cultivated and easy man of the world?  She smiled internally at the mere thought.  Whatever this stranger might be she felt that he was as far from being a man of the world as she was from being a Cockney sempstress or a veiled favourite in a harem.  She could not, she found, imagine him easily at home with any type of human being with which she was acquainted.  Yet no doubt, like all men, he had somewhere friends, relations, possibly even a wife, children.

No doubt—­then why could she not believe it?

The man had finished his fish.  He rested his broad, burnt hands on the table on each side of his plate and looked at them steadily.  Then he turned his head and glanced sideways at the priest, who was behind him to the right.  Then he looked again at his hands.  And Domini knew that all the time he was thinking about her, as she was thinking about him.  She felt the violence of his thought like the violence of a hand striking her.

The Arab waiter brought her some ragout of mutton and peas, and she looked down again at her plate.

As she left the room after dejeuner the priest again got up and bowed.  She stopped for a moment to speak to him.  All the French officers surveyed her tall, upright figure and broad, athletic shoulders with intent admiration.  Domini knew it and was indifferent.  If a hundred French soldiers had been staring at her critically she would not have cared at all.  She was not a shy woman and was in nowise uncomfortable when many eyes were fixed upon her.  So she stood and talked a little to the priest about Count Anteoni and her pleasure in his garden.  And as she did so, feeling her present calm self-possession, she wondered secretly at the wholly unnatural turmoil—­she called it that, exaggerating her feeling because it was unusual—­in which she had been a few minutes before as she sat at her table.

The priest spoke well of Count Anteoni.

“He is very generous,” he said.

Then he paused, twisting his napkin, and added: