his
lips, vanished. Suddenly he became younger in appearance. His figure
straightened itself. His hands ceased from trembling. He moved away from
the trees, and went to the doorway of the _fumoir_.

Domini looked up, saw him, and got up quietly, clasping her fingers
round the little book.

Androvsky stood just beyond the doorway, took off his hat, kept it in
his hand, and said:

"I came here to say good-bye."

He made a movement as if to come into the _fumoir_, but she stopped it
by coming at once to the opening. She felt that she could not speak to
him enclosed within walls, under a roof. He drew back, and she came out
and stood beside him on the sand.

"Did you know I should come?" he said.

She noticed that he had ceased to call her "Madame," and also that there
was in his voice a sound she had not heard in it before, a note of new
self-possession that suggested a spirit concentrating itself and aware
of its own strength to act.

"No," she answered.

"Were you coming back to the hotel this morning?" he asked.

"No."

He was silent for a moment. Then he said slowly:

"Then--then you did not wish--you did not mean to see me again before I
went?"

"It was not that. I came to the garden--I had to come--I had to be
alone."

"You want to be alone?" he said. "You want to be alone?"

Already the strength was dying out of his voice and face, and the old
uneasiness was waking up in him. A dreadful expression of pain came into
his eyes.

"Was that why you--you looked so happy?" he said in a harsh, trembling
voice.

"When?"

"I stood for a long while looking at you when you were in there"--he
pointed to the _fumoir_--"and your face was happy--your face was happy."

"Yes, I know."

"You will be happy alone?--alone in the desert?"

When he said that she felt suddenly the agony of the waterless spaces,
the agony of the unpeopled wastes. Her whole spirit shrank and quivered,
all the great joy of her love died within her. A moment before she had
stood upon the heights of her heart. Now she shrank into its deepest,
blackest abysses. She looked at him and said nothing.

"You will not be happy alone."

His voice no longer trembled. He caught hold of her left hand,
awkwardly, nervously, but held it strongly with his close to his side,
and went on speaking.

"Nobody is happy alone. Nothing is--men and women--children--animals." A
bird flew across the shadowy space under the trees, followed by another
bird