" Androvsky asked.

"Yes. Do you think it sounds like one?"

"How should I know, Madame?"

He stood looking in the direction from which the music came, and now it
seemed to hold him fascinated. After his question, which sounded to her
almost childlike, and which she did not answer, Domini glanced at his
attentive face, to which the green shadows lent a dimness that was
mysterious, at his tall figure, which always suggested to her both
weariness and strength, and remembered the passionate romance to whose
existence she awoke when she first heard Larbi's flute. It was as if
a shutter, which had closed a window in the house of life, had been
suddenly drawn away, giving to her eyes the horizon of a new world.
Was that shutter now drawn back for him? No doubt the supposition was
absurd. Men of his emotional and virile type have travelled far in that
world, to her mysterious, ere they reach his length of years. What was
extraordinary to her, in the thought of it alone, was doubtless quite
ordinary to him, translated into act. Not ignorant, she was nevertheless
a perfectly innocent woman, but her knowledge told her that no man of
Androvsky's strength, power and passion is innocent at Androvsky's age.
Yet his last dropped-out question was very deceptive. It had sounded
absolutely natural and might have come from a boy's pure lips. Again he
made her wonder.

There was a garden bench close to where they were standing. "If you like
to listen for a moment we might sit down," she said.

He started.

"Yes. Thank you."

When they were sitting side by side, closely guarded by the gigantic fig
and chestnut trees which grew in this part of the garden, he added:

"Whom does he love?"

"No doubt one of those native women whom you consider utterly without
attraction," she answered with a faint touch of malice which made him
redden.

"But you come here every day?" he said.

"I!"

"Yes. Has he ever seen you?"

"Larbi? Often. What has that to do with it?"

He did not reply.

Odd and disconnected as Larbi's melodies were, they created an
atmosphere of wild tenderness. Spontaneously they bubbled up out of the
heart of the Eastern world and, when the player was invisible as now,
suggested an ebon faun couched in hot sand at the foot of a palm tree
and making music to listening sunbeams and amorous spirits of the waste.

"Do you like it?" she said presently in an under voice.

"Yes, Madame. And you?"

"I love it, but not a