od-hearted
man who was human even in his detachment from ordinary humanity. His
humour was a salt with plenty of savour. His imagination was of a sort
which interested and even charmed her.

She felt, too, that she interested him and that he was a man not readily
interested in ordinary human beings. He had seen too many and judged
too shrewdly and too swiftly to be easily held for very long. She had no
ambition to hold him, and had never in her life consciously striven to
attract or retain any man, but she was woman enough to find his
obvious pleasure in her society agreeable. She thought that her genuine
adoration of the garden he had made, of the land in which it was set,
had not a little to do with the happy nature of their intercourse. For
she felt certain that beneath the light satire of his manner, his often
smiling airs of detachment and quiet independence, there was something
that could seek almost with passion, that could cling with resolution,
that could even love with persistence. And she fancied that he sought
in the desert, that he clung to its mystery, that he loved it and the
garden he had created in it. Once she had laughingly called him a desert
spirit. He had smiled as if with contentment.

They knew little of each other, yet they had become friends in the
garden which he never left.

One day she said to him:

"You love the desert. Why do you never go into it?"

"I prefer to watch it," he relied. "When you are in the desert it
bewilders you."

She remembered what she had felt during her first ride with Androvsky.

"I believe you are afraid of it," she said challengingly.

"Fear is sometimes the beginning of wisdom," he answered. "But you are
without it, I know."

"How do you know?"

"Every day I see you galloping away into the sun."

She thought there was a faint sound of warning--or was it of rebuke--in
his voice. It made her feel defiant.

"I think you lose a great deal by not galloping into the sun too," she
said.

"But if I don't ride?"

That made her think of Androvsky and his angry resolution. It had not
been the resolution of a day. Wearied and stiffened as he had been by
the expedition to Sidi-Zerzour, actually injured by his fall--she knew
from Batouch that he had been obliged to call in the Beni-Mora doctor to
bandage his shoulder--she had been roused at dawn on the day following
by his tread on the verandah. She had lain still while it descended
the staircase, but then the