her
before a steady wind that set from her to it. Soon it would disappear,
would be as if it had never been. Now and then, with a sort of fierce
obstinacy, she tried to stay the flight she had desired, and desired
still. She said to herself, "I will remember. It's contemptible to
forget like this. It's weak to be able to." Then she looked at the
mountains or the desert, at two Arabs playing the ladies' game under the
shadow of a cafe wall, or at a girl in dusty orange filling a goatskin
pitcher at a well beneath a palm tree, and she succumbed to the lulling
influence, smiling as they smile who hear the gentle ripple of the
waters of Lethe.

She heard them perhaps most clearly when she wandered in Count Anteoni's
garden. He had made her free of it in their first interview. She had
ventured to take him at his word, knowing that if he repented she would
divine it. He had made her feel that he had not repented. Sometimes
she did not see him as she threaded the sandy alleys between the little
rills, hearing the distant song of Larbi's amorous flute, or sat in the
dense shade of the trees watching through a window-space of quivering
golden leaves the passing of the caravans along the desert tracks.
Sometimes a little wreath of ascending smoke, curling above the purple
petals of bougainvilleas, or the red cloud of oleanders, told her of his
presence, in some retired thinking-place. Oftener he joined her, with
an easy politeness that did not conceal his oddity, but clothed it in a
pleasant garment, and they talked for a while or stayed for a while in
an agreeable silence that each felt to be sympathetic.

Domini thought of him as a new species of man--a hermit of the world.
He knew the world and did not hate it. His satire was rarely quite
ungentle. He did not strike her as a disappointed man who fled to
solitude in bitterness of spirit, but rather as an imaginative man with
an unusual feeling for romance, and perhaps a desire for freedom that
the normal civilised life restrained too much. He loved thought as many
love conversation, silence as some love music. Now and then he said a
sad or bitter thing. Sometimes she seemed to be near to something stern.
Sometimes she felt as if there were a secret link which connected him
with the perfume-seller in his little darkened chamber, with the legions
who prayed about the tomb of Sidi-Zerzour. But these moments were rare.
As a rule he was whimsical and kind, with the kindness of a go