ed, still with a certain
excitement which he evidently endeavoured to repress. "I--I had the
right, the duty of cultivating the land."

"Well, however it was, you were always at work; you were responsible,
weren't you?"

"Yes."

"I can't see you even in the vineyards or the wheat-fields. Isn't it
strange?"

She was always looking at him with the same deep and wholly
unselfconscious inquiry.

"And as to London, Paris--"

Suddenly she burst into a little laugh and her gravity vanished.

"I think you would hate them," she said. "And they--they wouldn't like
you because they wouldn't understand you."

"Let us buy our oasis," he said abruptly. "Build our African house, sell
our dates and remain in the desert. I hear Batouch. It must be time to
ride on to Mogar. Batouch! Batouch!"

Batouch came from the courtyard of the house wiping the remains of a
cous-cous from his languid lips.

"Untie the horses," said Androvsky.

"But, Monsieur, it is still too hot to travel. Look! No one is stirring.
All the village is asleep."

He waved his enormous hand, with henna-tinted nails, towards the distant
town, carved surely out of one huge piece of bronze.

"Untie the horses. There are gazelle in the plain near Mogar. Didn't you
tell me?"

"Yes, Monsieur, but--"

"We'll get there early and go out after them at sunset. Now, Domini."

They rode away in the burning heat of the noon towards the southwest
across the vast plains of grey sand, followed at a short distance by
Batouch and Ali.

"Monsieur is mad to start in the noon," grumbled Batouch. "But Monsieur
is not like Madame. He may live in the desert till he is old and his
hair is grey as the sand, but he will never be an Arab in his heart."

"Why, Batouch-ben-Brahim?"

"He cannot rest. To Madame the desert gives its calm, but to Monsieur--"
He did not finish his sentence. In front Domini and Androvsky had put
their horses to a gallop. The sand flew up in a thin cloud around them.

"Nom d'un chien!" said Batouch, who, in unpoetical moments, occasionally
indulged in the expletives of the French infidels who were his country's
rulers. "What is there in the mind of Monsieur which makes him ride as
if he fled from an enemy?"

"I know not, but he goes like a hare before the sloughi, Batouch-ben
Brahim," answered Ali, gravely.

Then they sent their horses on in chase of the cloud of sand towards the
southwest.

About four in the afternoon they reached the camp at