“I wish to sit quite near the door,” she whispered to Batouch as they went in.

“But it is much better—­”

“Do what I tell you,” she said.  “The left side of the room.”

Hadj looked a little happier.  Suzanne was clinging to his arm.  He smiled at her with something of mischief, but he took care, when a place was cleared on a bench for their party, to sit down at the end next the door, and he cast an anxious glance towards the platform where the dancing-girls attached to the cafe sat in a row, hunched up against the bare wall, waiting their turn to perform.  Then suddenly he shook his head, tucked in his chin and laughed.  His whole face was transformed from craven fear to vivacious rascality.  While he laughed he looked at Batouch, who was ordering four cups of coffee from the negro attendant.  The poet took no notice.  For the moment he was intent upon his professional duties.  But when the coffee was brought, and set upon a round wooden stool between two bunches of roses, he had time to note Hadj’s sudden gaiety and to realise its meaning.  Instantly he spoke to the negro in a low voice.  Hadj stopped laughing.  The negro sped away and returned with the proprietor of the cafe, a stout Kabyle with a fair skin and blue eyes.

Batouch lowered his voice to a guttural whisper and spoke in Arabic, while Hadj, shifting uneasily on the end seat, glanced at him sideways out of his almond-shaped eyes.  Domini heard the name “Irena,” and guessed that Batouch was asking the Kabyle to send for her and make her dance.  She could not help being amused for a moment by the comedy of intrigue, complacently malignant on both sides, that was being played by the two cousins, but the moment passed and left her engrossed, absorbed, and not merely by the novelty of the surroundings, by the strangeness of the women, of their costumes, and of their movements.  She watched them, but she watched more closely, more eagerly, rather as a spy than as a spectator, one who was watching them with an intentness, a still passion, a fierce curiosity and a sort of almost helpless wonder such as she had never seen before, and could never have found within herself to put at the service of any human marvel.

Close to the top of the room on the right the stranger was sitting in the midst of a mob of Arabs, whose flowing draperies almost concealed his ugly European clothes.  On the wall immediately behind him was a brilliantly-coloured drawing of a fat Ouled Nail leering at a French soldier, which made an unconventional background to his leaning figure and sunburnt face, in which there seemed now to be both asceticism and something so different and so powerful that it was likely, from moment to moment, to drive out the asceticism and to achieve the loneliness of all conquering things.  This fighting expression made Domini think of a picture she had once seen representing a pilgrim going through a dark forest attended by his angel and his devil.