“The Arabs are always like that, Madame.”

She looked at him, then she said, abruptly: 

“Do you speak English?”

Her companion hesitated.  It was perfectly obvious to her that he was considering whether he should answer “Yes” or “No.”  Such hesitation about such a matter was very strange.  At last he said, but still in French: 

“Yes.”

And directly he had said it she saw by his face that he wished he had said “No.”

From the cafe the Arabs began to pour into the street.  The patrol was clearing the place.  The women leaning over the balconies cried out shrilly to learn the exact history of the tumult, and the men standing underneath, and lifting up their bronzed faces in the moonlight, replied in violent voices, gesticulating vehemently while their hanging sleeves fell back from their hairy arms.

“I am an Englishwoman,” Domini said.

But she too felt obliged to speak still in French, as if a sudden reserve told her to do so.  He said nothing.  They were standing in quite a crowd now.  It swayed, parted suddenly, and the soldiers appeared holding Irena.  Hadj followed behind, shouting as if in a frenzy of passion.  There was some blood on one of his hands and a streak of blood on the front of the loose shirt he wore under his burnous.  He kept on shooting out his arms towards Irena as he walked, and frantically appealing to the Arabs round him.  When he saw the women on their balconies he stopped for a moment and called out to them like a man beside himself.  A Tirailleur pushed him on.  The women, who had been quiet to hear him, burst forth again into a paroxysm of chatter.  Irena looked utterly indifferent and walked feebly.  The little procession disappeared in the moonlight accompanied by the crowd.

“She has stabbed Hadj,” Domini said.  “Batouch will be glad.”

She did not feel as if she were sorry.  Indeed, she thought she was glad too.  That the dancer should try to do a thing and fail would have seemed contradictory.  And the streak of blood she had just seen seemed to relieve her suddenly and to take from her all anger.  Her self-control returned.

“Thank you once more,” she said to her companion.  “Goodnight.”

She remembered the episode of the tower that afternoon, and resolved to take a definite line this time, and not to run the chance of a second desertion.  She started off down the street, but found him walking beside her in silence.  She stopped.

“I am very much obliged to you for getting me out,” she said, looking straight at him.  “And now, good-night.”

Almost for the first time he endured her gaze without any uncertainty, and she saw that though he might be hesitating, uneasy, even contemptible—­as when he hurried down the road in the wake of the negro procession—­he could also be a dogged man.

“I’ll go with you, Madame,” he said.

“Why?”