an accident. Don't think of it any more."

She did not look at him.

"Where money is concerned the Arabs are very persistent," she continued.

The man laid one of his brown hands on the top of the parapet. She
looked at it, and it seemed to her that she had never before seen the
back of a hand express so much of character, look so intense, so ardent,
and so melancholy as his.

"Yes, Madame."

He still spoke with an odd timidity, with an air of listening to his own
speech as if in some strange way it were phenomenal to him. It occurred
to her that possibly he had lived much in lonely places, in which his
solitude had rarely been broken, and he had been forced to acquire the
habit of silence.

"But they are very picturesque. They look almost like some religious
order when they wear their hoods. Don't you think so?"

She saw the brown hand lifted from the parapet, and heard her
companion's feet shift on the floor of the tower. But this time he said
nothing. As she could not see his hand now she looked out again over
the panorama of the evening, which was deepening in intensity with every
passing moment, and immediately she was conscious of two feelings that
filled her with wonder: a much stronger and sweeter sense of the African
magic than she had felt till now, and the certainty that the greater
force and sweetness of her feeling were caused by the fact that she had
a companion in her contemplation. This was strange. An intense desire
for loneliness had driven her out of Europe to this desert place, and a
companion, who was an utter stranger, emphasised the significance, gave
fibre to the beauty, intensity to the mystery of that which she looked
on. It was as if the meaning of the African evening were suddenly
doubled. She thought of a dice-thrower who throws one die and turns up
six, then throws two and turns up twelve. And she remained silent in her
surprise. The man stood silently beside her. Afterwards she felt as if,
during this silence in the tower, some powerful and unseen being had
arrived mysteriously, introduced them to one another and mysteriously
departed.

The evening drew on in their silence and the dream was deeper now. All
that Domini had felt when first she approached the parapet she felt more
strangely, and she grasped, with physical and mental vision, not only
the whole, but the innumerable parts of that which she looked on. She
saw, fancifully, the circles widen in the pool of peace, but she