.

"Of whom, Madame?"

She was silent. She seemed to be considering. He watched her with
curiosity in his bright eyes.

"Of the desert," she answered at length, quite seriously.

"A secret agent has always a definite object. What is mine?"

"How can I know? How can I tell what the desert desires?"

"Already you personify it!"

The network of wrinkles showed itself in his brown face as he smiled,
surely with triumph.

"I think I did that from the first," she answered gravely. "I know I
did."

"And what sort of personage does the desert seem to you?"

"You ask me a great many questions to-day."

"Mirage questions, perhaps. Forgive me. Let us listen to the
question--or is it the demand?--of the desert in this noontide hour, the
greatest hour of all the twenty-four in such a land as this."

They were silent again, watching the noon, listening to it, feeling it,
as they had been silent when the Mueddin's nasal voice rose in the call
to prayer.

Count Anteoni stood in the sunshine by the low white parapet of the
garden. Domini sat on a low chair in the shadow cast by a great jamelon
tree. At her feet was a bush of vivid scarlet geraniums, against
which her white linen dress looked curiously blanched. There was a
half-drowsy, yet imaginative light in her gipsy eyes, and her motionless
figure, her quiet hands, covered with white gloves, lying loosely in her
lap, looked attentive and yet languid, as if some spell began to bind
her but had not completed its work of stilling all the pulses of life
that throbbed within her. And in truth there was a spell upon her, the
spell of the golden noon. By turns she gave herself to it consciously,
then consciously strove to deny herself to its subtle summons. And each
time she tried to withdraw it seemed to her that the spell was a little
stronger, her power a little weaker. Then her lips curved in a smile
that was neither joyous nor sad, that was perhaps rather part perplexed
and part expectant.

After a minute of this silence Count Anteoni drew back from the sun and
sat down in a chair beside Domini. He took out his watch.

"Twenty-five minutes," he said, "and my guests will be here."

"Guests!" she said with an accent of surprise.

"I invited the priest to make an even number."

"Oh!"

"You don't dislike him?"

"I like him. I respect him."

"But I'm afraid you aren't pleased?"

Domini looked him straight in the face.

"Why did you invite Father Roubier?" she