She felt, too, that she interested him and that he was a man not readily interested in ordinary human beings. He had seen too many and judged too shrewdly and too swiftly to be easily held for very long. She had no ambition to hold him, and had never in her life consciously striven to attract or retain any man, but she was woman enough to find his obvious pleasure in her society agreeable. She thought that her genuine adoration of the garden he had made, of the land in which it was set, had not a little to do with the happy nature of their intercourse. For she felt certain that beneath the light satire of his manner, his often smiling airs of detachment and quiet independence, there was something that could seek almost with passion, that could cling with resolution, that could even love with persistence. And she fancied that he sought in the desert, that he clung to its mystery, that he loved it and the garden he had created in it. Once she had laughingly called him a desert spirit. He had smiled as if with contentment. They knew little of each other, yet they had become friends in the garden which he never left. One day she said to him: “You love the desert. Why do you never go into it?” “I prefer to watch it,” he relied. “When you are in the desert it bewilders you.” She remembered what she had felt during her first ride with Androvsky. “I believe you are afraid of it,” she said challengingly. “Fear is sometimes the beginning of wisdom,” he answered. “But you are without it, I know.” “How do you know?” “Every day I see you galloping away into the sun.” She thought there was a faint sound of warning--or was it of rebuke--in his voice. It made her feel defiant. “I think you lose a great deal by not galloping into the sun too,” she said. “But if I don’t ride?” That made her think of Androvsky and his angry resolution. It had not been the resolution of a day. Wearied and stiffened as he had been by the expedition to Sidi-Zerzour, actually injured by his fall--she knew from Batouch that he had been obliged to call in the Beni-Mora doctor to bandage his shoulder--she had been roused at dawn on the day following by his tread on the verandah. She had lain still while it descended the staircase, but then the sharp neighing of a horse had awakened an irresistible curiosity in her. She had got up, wrapped herself in a fur coat and slipped out on to the verandah. The sun was not above the horizon line of the desert, but the darkness of night was melting into a luminous grey. The air was almost cold. The palms looked spectral, even terrible, the empty and silent gardens melancholy and dangerous. It was not an hour for activity, for determination, but for reverie, for apprehension.