she added. "I am a fool. Out here I do love truth."

Androvsky dropped his eyes. His whole body expressed humiliation, and
something that suggested to her despair.

"Oh, you must think me mad to speak like this!" she exclaimed. "Of
course people must be allowed to arm themselves against the curiosity
of others. I know that. The fact is I am under a spell here. I have been
living for many, many years in the cold. I have been like a woman in a
prison without any light, and--"

"You have been in a prison!" he said, lifting his head and looking at
her eagerly.

"I have been living in what is called the great world."

"And you call that a prison?"

"Now that I am living in the greater world, really living at last. I
have been in the heart of insincerity, and now I have come into the
heart, the fiery heart of sincerity. It's there--there"--she pointed
to the desert. "And it has intoxicated me; I think it has made me
unreasonable. I expect everyone--not an Arab--to be as it is, and every
little thing that isn't quite frank, every pretence, is like a horrible
little hand tugging at me, as if trying to take me back to the prison I
have left. I think, deep down, I have always loathed lies, but never as
I have loathed them since I came here. It seems to me as if only in the
desert there is freedom for the body, and only in truth there is freedom
for the soul."

She stopped, drew a long breath, and added:

"You must forgive me. I have worried you. I have made you do what you
didn't want to do. And then I have attacked you. It is unpardonable."

"Show me the garden, Madame," he said in a very low voice.

Her outburst over, she felt a slight self-consciousness. She wondered
what he thought of her and became aware of her unconventionality. His
curious and persistent reticence made her frankness the more marked.
Yet the painful sensation of oppression and exasperation had passed away
from her and she no longer thought of his personality as destructive.
In obedience to his last words she walked on, and he kept heavily beside
her, till they were in the deep shadows of the closely-growing trees and
the spell of the garden began to return upon her, banishing the thought
of self.

"Listen!" she said presently.

Larbi's flute was very near.

"He is always playing," she whispered.

"Who is he?"

"One of the gardeners. But he scarcely ever works. He is perpetually in
love. That is why he plays."

"Is that a love-tune then?