you had kindly wished me to come--"

He stopped.

"Well?" she said, in rather a hard voice.

"Madame, I don't know what I thought, what I think--only I cannot bear
that you should apologise for any conduct of mine. Indeed, I cannot bear
it."

He looked fearfully excited and moved two or three steps away, then
returned.

"Were you doing that?" he asked. "Were you, Madame?"

"I never mentioned your name to Father Roubier, nor did he to me," she
answered.

For a moment he looked relieved, then a sudden suspicion seemed to
strike him.

"But without mentioning my name?" he said.

"You wish to accuse me of quibbling, of insincerity, then!" she
exclaimed with a heat almost equal to his own.

"No, Madame, no! Madame, I--I have suffered much. I am suspicious of
everybody. Forgive me, forgive me!"

He spoke almost with distraction. In his manner there was something
desperate.

"I am sure you have suffered," she said more gently, yet with a certain
inflexibility at which she herself wondered, yet which she could not
control. "You will always suffer if you cannot govern yourself. You will
make people dislike you, be suspicious of you."

"Suspicious! Who is suspicious of me?" he asked sharply. "Who has any
right to be suspicious of me?"

She looked up and fancied that, for an instant, she saw something as
ugly as terror in his eyes.

"Surely you know that people don't ask permission to be suspicious of
their fellow-men?" she said.

"No one here has any right to consider me or my actions," he said,
fierceness blazing out of him. "I am a free man, and can do as I will.
No one has any right--no one!"

Domini felt as if the words were meant for her, as if he had struck
her. She was so angry that she did not trust herself to speak, and
instinctively she put her hand up to her breast, as a woman might who
had received a blow. She touched something small and hard that was
hidden beneath her gown. It was the little wooden crucifix Androvsky had
thrown into the stream at Sidi-Zerzour. As she realised that her anger
died. She was humbled and ashamed. What was her religion if, at a word,
she could be stirred to such a feeling of passion?

"I, at least, am not suspicious of you," she said, choosing the very
words that were most difficult for her to say just then. "And Father
Roubier--if you included him--is too fine-hearted to cherish unworthy
suspicions of anyone."

She got up. Her voice was full of a subdued, but s