answered--"did you not feel a tragic influence when we
arrived here? Do you remember how you looked at the tower?"

"The tower!" he said, with a quick glance at De Trevignac. "I--why
should I look at the tower?"

"I don't know, but you did, almost as if you were afraid of it."

"My tower!" said De Trevignac.

Another roar of laughter reached them from the camp fire. It made Domini
smile in sympathy, but De Trevignac and Androvsky looked at each other
for a moment, the one with a sort of earnest inquiry, the other with
hostility, or what seemed hostility, across the circle of lamplight that
lay between them.

"A tower rising in the desert emphasises the desolation. I suppose that
was it," Androvsky said, as the laugh died down into Batouch's throaty
chuckle. "It suggests lonely people watching."

"For something that never comes, or something terrible that comes," De
Trevignac said.

As he spoke the last words Androvsky moved uneasily in his chair, and
looked out towards the camp, as if he longed to get up and go into the
open air, as if the tent roof above his head oppressed him.

Trevignac turned to Domini.

"In this case, Madame, you were the lonely watcher, and I was the
something terrible that came."

She laughed. While she laughed De Trevignac noticed that Androvsky
looked at her with a sort of sad intentness, not reproachful or
wondering, as an older person might look at a child playing at the edge
of some great gulf into which a false step would precipitate it. He
strove to interpret this strange look, so obviously born in the face of
his host in connection with himself. It seemed to him that he must have
met Androvsky, and that Androvsky knew it, knew--what he did not yet
know--where it was and when. It seemed to him, too, that Androvsky
thought of him as the "something terrible" that had come to this woman
who sat between them out of the desert.

But how could it be?

A profound curiosity was roused in him and he mentally cursed his
treacherous memory--if it were treacherous. For possibly he might be
mistaken. He had perhaps never met his host before, and this strange
manner of his might be due to some inexplicable cause, or perhaps to
some cause explicable and even commonplace. This Monsieur Androvsky
might be a very jealous man, who had taken this woman away into the
desert to monopolise her, and who resented even the chance intrusion of
a stranger. De Trevignac knew life and the strange passio