his voice till she could
scarcely hear him, and sounded like a man communing with himself.

A red light from the sinking sun fell upon the dunes. As they rode
back over them their horses seemed to be wading through a silent sea
of blood. The sky in the west looked like an enormous conflagration, in
which tortured things were struggling and lifting twisted arms.

Domini's acquaintance with Androvsky had not progressed as easily and
pleasantly as her intercourse with Count Anteoni. She recognised that
he was what is called a "difficult man." Now and then, as if under the
prompting influence of some secret and violent emotion, he spoke with
apparent naturalness, spoke perhaps out of his heart. Each time he did
so she noticed that there was something of either doubt or amazement in
what he said. She gathered that he was slow to rely, quick to mistrust.
She gathered, too, that very many things surprised him, and felt sure
that he hid nearly all of them from her, and would--had not his own will
sometimes betrayed him--have hidden all. His reserve was as intense as
everything about him. There was a fierceness in it that revealed its
existence. He always conveyed to her a feeling of strength, physical and
mental. Yet he always conveyed, too, a feeling of uneasiness. To a woman
of Domini's temperament uneasiness usually implies a public or secret
weakness. In Androvsky's she seemed to be aware of passion, as if it
were one to dash obstacles aside, to break through doors of iron, to
rush out into the open. And then--what then? To tremble at the world
before him? At what he had done? She did not know. But she did know
that even in his uneasiness there seemed to be fibre, muscle, sinew,
nerve--all which goes to make strength, swiftness.

Speech was singularly difficult to him. Silence seemed to be natural,
not irksome. After a few words he fell into it and remained in it. And
he was less self-conscious in silence than in speech. He seemed, she
fancied, to feel himself safer, more a man when he was not speaking. To
him the use of words was surely like a yielding.

He had a peculiar faculty of making his presence felt when he was
silent, as if directly he ceased from speaking the flame in him was
fanned and leaped up at the outside world beyond its bars.

She did not know whether he was a gentleman or not.

If anyone had asked her, before she came to Beni-Mora, whether it would
be possible for her to take four solitary rides wi