"

Hearing his name Androvsky turned, and the Count at once made his
excuses to him and followed Smain towards the garden gate, carrying the
letter that had come from Beni-Hassan in his hand.

When he had gone Domini remained on the divan, and Androvsky by the
door, with his eyes on the ground. She took another cigarette from the
box on the table beside her, struck a match and lit it carefully. Then
she said:

"Do you care to see the garden?"

She spoke indifferently, coldly. The desire to show her Paradise to him
had died away, but the parting words of the Count prompted the question,
and so she put it as to a stranger.

"Thank you, Madame--yes," he replied, as if with an effort.

She got up, and they went out together on to the broad walk.

"Which way do you want to go?" she asked.

She saw him glance at her quickly, with anxiety in his eyes.

"You know best where we should go, Madame."

"I daresay you won't care about it. Probably you are not interested in
gardens. It does not matter really which path we take. They are all very
much alike."

"I am sure they are all very beautiful."

Suddenly he had become humble, anxious to please her. But now the
violent contrasts in him, unlike the violent contrasts of nature in this
land, exasperated her. She longed to be left alone. She felt ashamed of
Androvsky, and also of herself; she condemned herself bitterly for the
interest she had taken in him, for her desire to put some pleasure into
a life she had deemed sad, for her curiosity about him, for her wish
to share joy with him. She laughed at herself secretly for what she now
called her folly in having connected him imaginatively with the desert,
whereas in reality he made the desert, as everything he approached, lose
in beauty and wonder. His was a destructive personality. She knew it
now. Why had she not realised it before? He was a man to put gall in the
cup of pleasure, to create uneasiness, self-consciousness, constraint
round about him, to call up spectres at the banquet of life. Well, in
the future she could avoid him. After to-day she need never have any
more intercourse with him. With that thought, that interior sense of
her perfect freedom in regard to this man, an abrupt, but always cold,
content came to her, putting him a long way off where surely all that he
thought and did was entirely indifferent to her.

"Come along then," she said. "We'll go this way."

And she turned down an alley which led