ieur. We found gazelle, and so I hope--I hope you will
have a fairly good dinner."

The words could scarcely have been more ordinary, but the way in which
they were uttered was so strange, sounded indeed so forced, and so
unnatural, that both De Trevignac and Domini looked at the speaker in
surprise. There was a pause. Then Batouch and Ouardi came in with the
soup.

"Come!" Domini said. "Let us begin. Monsieur de Trevignac, will you sit
here on my right?"

They sat down. The two men were opposite to each other at the ends of
the small table, with a lamp between them. Domini faced the tent door,
and could see in the distance the tents of the attendants lit up by the
blaze of the fire, and the forms of the French soldiers sitting at their
table close to it, with the Arabs clustering round them. Sounds of loud
conversation and occasional roars of laughter, that was almost childish
in its frank lack of all restraint, told her that one feast was a
success. She looked at her companions and made a sudden resolve--almost
fierce--that the other, over which she was presiding, should be a
success, too. But why was Androvsky so strange with other men? Why did
he seem to become almost a different human being directly he was brought
into any close contact with his kind? Was it shyness? Had he a profound
hatred of all society? She remembered Count Anteoni's luncheon and
the distress Androvsky had caused her by his cold embarrassment, his
unwillingness to join in conversation on that occasion. But then he
was only her friend. Now he was her husband. She longed for him to show
himself at his best. That he was not a man of the world she knew. Had he
not told her of his simple upbringing in El Kreir, a remote village of
Tunisia, by a mother who had been left in poverty after the death of
his father, a Russian who had come to Africa to make a fortune by
vine-growing, and who had had his hopes blasted by three years of
drought and by the visitation of the dreaded phylloxera? Had he not told
her of his own hard work on the rich uplands among the Spanish workmen,
of how he had toiled early and late in all kinds of weather, not for
himself, but for a company that drew a fortune from the land and gave
him a bare livelihood? Till she met him he had never travelled--he had
never seen almost anything of life. A legacy from a relative had at last
enabled him to have some freedom and to gratify a man's natural taste
for change. And, strangely, pe