The angel of the pilgrim was a weak and almost childish figure, frail, bloodless, scarcely even radiant, while the devil was lusty and bold, with a muscular body and a sensual, aquiline face, which smiled craftily, looking at the pilgrim.  There was surely a devil in the watching traveller which was pushing the angel out of him.  Domini had never before seemed to see clearly the legendary battle of the human heart.  But it had never before been manifested to her audaciously in the human face.

All around the Arabs sat, motionless and at ease, gazing on the curious dance of which they never tire—­a dance which has some ingenuity, much sensuality and provocation, but little beauty and little mystery, unless—­as happens now and then—­an idol-like woman of the South, with all the enigma of the distant desert in her kohl-tinted eyes, dances it with the sultry gloom of a half-awakened sphinx, and makes of it a barbarous manifestation of the nature that lies hidden in the heart of the sun, a silent cry uttered by a savage body born in a savage land.

In the cafe of Tahar, the Kabyle, there was at present no such woman.  His beauties, huddled together on their narrow bench before a table decorated with glasses of water and sprigs of orange blossom in earthen vases, looked dull and cheerless in their gaudy clothes.  Their bodies were well formed, but somnolent.  Their painted hands hung down like the hands of marionettes.  The one who was dancing suggested Duty clad in Eastern garb and laying herself out carefully to be wicked.  Her jerks and wrigglings, though violent, were inhuman, like those of a complicated piece of mechanism devised by a morbid engineer.  After a glance or two at her Domini felt that she was bored by her own agilities.  Domini’s wonder increased when she looked again at the traveller.

For it was this dance of the ennui of the East which raised up in him this obvious battle, which drove his secret into the illumination of the hanging lamps and gave it to a woman, who felt half confused, half ashamed at possessing it, and yet could not cast it away.

If they both lived on, without speaking or meeting, for another half century, Domini could never know the shape of the devil in this man, the light of the smile upon its face.

The dancing woman had observed him, and presently she began slowly to wriggle towards him between the rows of Arabs, fixing her eyes upon him and parting her scarlet lips in a greedy smile.  As she came on the stranger evidently began to realise that he was her bourne.  He had been leaning forward, but when she approached, waving her red hands, shaking her prominent breasts, and violently jerking her stomach, he sat straight up, and then, as if instinctively trying to get away from her, pressed back against the wall, hiding the painting of the Ouled Nail and the French soldier.  A dark flush rose on his face and even flooded his forehead to his low-growing hair.