Everybody listened to Rosas. Only the slight fluttering of fans was heard like a beating of wings. Without changing the tone of his discourse, and recounting his travels to his audience as if he were addressing only Marianne, he told in a voice more Italian than Spanish, in musical, non-guttural cadences, of his experiences on the borders of the Nile, of the weariness of the caravans, of the nights passed under star-strewn skies, of the songs of the camel-driver, slowly intoned like prayers, of the gloom of solitary wastes and of the poetic associations of the ruins slumbering amid the red sands of the desert. At times he recited a translation of an Arabian song or remarked in passing, on some mournful ballad, refined as a Sennett, deep as the infinite, in which the eternal words of love, tender and affecting in all languages, assumed an intensely poetic character under the influence of their Semitic nature; songs in which passers-by, strangers, lovers dead for centuries, who had strewed, as it were, their joys and their sobs over the sands of the desert, told the color of the hair and of the eyes of their dear ones, pleaded with their betrothed dead for the alms of love, and promised to spectres of women rose-colored garments and flowers that time would never wither. These songs of Arabs dying for Nazarenes, of sons of Mohammed sacrificing themselves for the daughters of Aissa were so translated by this Castilian that the exquisite charm of the original, filtered through his rendering, lost none,--even in French,--of the special characteristics of his own nation, a half-daughter of the Orient. And inevitably, with its melancholy repetition, the poetry he spoke of dwelt on wounded, suffering love, on the anguish of timid hearts, and the sobs of unknown despairing Arabs, buried for ages under the sands of the desert. The duke seemed to take pleasure in dwelling on these poetic quotations rather than on the reminiscences of his travels. His individuality, his own impressions vanished before this passionate legacy bequeathed by one human race to another. Marianne trembled, believing that she could see even in Rosas's thoughts a desire to speak especially for her and to her. Was it not thus that he spoke in his own house in the presence of Lissac, squatting on his divan like an Arab story-teller? She felt her youth renewed by the memory of all those past years. She thought herself back once more in the studio on Rue de Laval. Sabine Marsy's salon disappeared, Rosas was whispering in her ear, looking at her, and allowing the love that he felt to be perceived, in spite of Guy. Guy! who was Guy? Marianne troubled herself about no one but De Rosas. Only the duke existed now. Had Guy been blended with her life but for a single moment? She embraced Rosas with her burning glance.