tiously and yet powerfully. He said it, and last night the
African hautboy had said it. Peace and a flame. Could they exist
together, blended, married?

"Africa seems to me to agree through contradiction," she added, smiling
a little, and touching the snowy wall with her right hand. "But then,
this is my first day."

"Mine was when I was a boy of sixteen."

"This garden wasn't here then?"

"No. I had it made. I came here with my mother. She spoilt me. She let
me have my whim."

"This garden is your boy's whim?"

"It was. Now it is a man's----"

He seemed to hesitate.

"Paradise," suggested Domini.

"I think I was going to say hiding-place."

There was no bitterness in his odd, ugly voice, yet surely the words
implied bitterness. The wounded, the fearful, the disappointed, the
condemned hide. Perhaps he remembered this, for he added rather quickly:

"I come here to be foolish, Madame, for I come here to think. This is my
special thinking place."

"How strange!" Domini exclaimed impulsively, and leaning forward on the
divan.

"Is it?"

"I only mean that already Beni-Mora has seemed to me the ideal place for
that."

"For thought?"

"For finding out interior truth."

Count Anteoni looked at her rather swiftly and searchingly. His eyes
were not large, but they were bright, and held none of the languor
so often seen in the eyes of his countrymen. His face was expressive
through its mobility rather than through its contours. The features were
small and refined, not noble, but unmistakably aristocratic. The nose
was sensitive, with wide nostrils. A long and straight moustache,
turning slightly grey, did not hide the mouth, which had unusually pale
lips. The ears were set very flat against the head, and were finely
shaped. The chin was pointed. The general look of the whole face was
tense, critical, conscious, but in the defiant rather than in the timid
sense. Such an expression belongs to men who would always be aware of
the thoughts and feelings of others concerning them, but who would throw
those thoughts and feelings off as decisively and energetically as a dog
shakes the waterdrops from its coat on emerging from a swim.

"And sending it forth, like Ishmael, to shift for itself in the desert,"
he said.

The odd remark sounded like neither statement nor question, merely like
the sudden exclamation of a mind at work.

"Will you allow me to take you through the rest of the garden, Madame?"
he added