moon?"

"Suppose we choose that it shall be?"

"Can we choose such a thing? Is anybody allowed to choose to live always
quite happily without duties? Sometimes I wonder. I love this wandering
life so much, I am so happy in it, that I sometimes think it cannot last
much longer."

He began to sift the sand through his fingers swiftly.

"Duties?" he said in a low voice.

"Yes. Oughtn't we to do something presently, something besides being
happy?"

"What do you mean, Domini?"

"I hardly know, I don't know. You tell me."

There was an urging in her voice, as if she wanted, almost demanded,
something of him.

"You mean that a man must do some work in his life if he is to keep
himself a man," he said, not as if he were asking a question.

He spoke reluctantly but firmly.

"You know," he added, "that I have worked hard all my life, hard like a
labourer."

"Yes, I know," she said.

She stroked his hand, that was worn and rough, and spoke eloquently of
manual toil it had accomplished in the past.

"I know. Before we were married, that day when we sat in the garden, you
told me your life and I told you mine. How different they have been!"

"Yes," he said.

He lit a cigar and watched the smoke curling up into the gold of the
sunlit atmosphere.

"Mine in the midst of the world and yours so far away from it. I often
imagine that little place, El Krori, the garden, your brother, your
twin-brother Stephen, that one-eyed Arab servant--what was his name?"

"El Magin."

"Yes, El Magin, who taught you to play Cora and to sing Arab songs, and
to eat cous-cous with your fingers. I can almost see Father Andre,
from whom you learnt to love the Classics, and who talked to you of
philosophy. He's dead too, isn't he, like your mother?"

"I don't know whether Pere Andre is dead. I have lost sight of him,"
Androvsky said.

He still looked steadily at the rings of smoke curling up into the
golden air. There was in his voice a sound of embarrassment. She guessed
that it came from the consciousness of the pain he must have caused
the good priest who had loved him when he ceased from practising the
religion in which he had been brought up. Even to her he never spoke
frankly on religious subjects, but she knew that he had been baptised a
Catholic and been educated for a time by priests. She knew, too, that
he was no longer a practising Catholic, and that, for some reason, he
dreaded any intimacy with priests. He never spoke