g poured into a glass. She could not keep
her eyes down any more. Besides, why should she? Beni-Mora was
breeding in her a self-consciousness--or a too acute consciousness of
others--that was unnatural in her. She had never been sensitive like
this in her former life, but the fierce African sun seemed now to have
thawed the ice of her indifference. She felt everything with almost
unpleasant acuteness. All her senses seemed to her sharpened. She
saw, she heard, as she had never seen and heard till now. Suddenly she
remembered her almost violent prayer--"Let me be alive! Let me feel!"
and she was aware that such a prayer might have an answer that would be
terrible.

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. Sh