Presently he made his way at last towards the _fumoir_ in which Domini was still sitting, with one hand resting on the open page whose words had lit up the darkness in her spirit. He came to it so softly that she did not hear his step. He saw her, stood quite still under the trees, and looked at her for a long time. As he did so his face changed till he seemed to become another man. The ferocity of grief and anger faded from his eyes, which were filled with an expression of profound wonder, then of flickering uncertainty, then of hard, manly resolution--a fighting expression that was full of sex and passion. The guilty, furtive look which had been stamped upon all his features, specially upon his lips, vanished. Suddenly he became younger in appearance. His figure straightened itself. His hands ceased from trembling. He moved away from the trees, and went to the doorway of the _fumoir_. Domini looked up, saw him, and got up quietly, clasping her fingers round the little book. Androvsky stood just beyond the doorway, took off his hat, kept it in his hand, and said: “I came here to say good-bye.” He made a movement as if to come into the _fumoir_, but she stopped it by coming at once to the opening. She felt that she could not speak to him enclosed within walls, under a roof. He drew back, and she came out and stood beside him on the sand. “Did you know I should come?” he said. She noticed that he had ceased to call her “Madame,” and also that there was in his voice a sound she had not heard in it before, a note of new self-possession that suggested a spirit concentrating itself and aware of its own strength to act. “No,” she answered. “Were you coming back to the hotel this morning?” he asked. “No.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said slowly: “Then--then you did not wish--you did not mean to see me again before I went?” “It was not that. I came to the garden--I had to come--I had to be alone.” “You want to be alone?” he said. “You want to be alone?” Already the strength was dying out of his voice and face, and the old uneasiness was waking up in him. A dreadful expression of pain came into his eyes. “Was that why you--you looked so happy?” he said in a harsh, trembling voice. “When?” “I stood for a long while looking at you when you were in there”--he pointed to the _fumoir_--“and your face was happy--your face was happy.” “Yes, I know.” “You will be happy alone?--alone in the desert?” When he said that she felt suddenly the agony of the waterless spaces, the agony of the unpeopled wastes. Her whole spirit shrank and quivered, all the great joy of her love died within her. A moment before she had stood upon the heights of her heart. Now she shrank into its deepest, blackest abysses. She looked at him and said nothing. “You will not be happy alone.” His voice no longer trembled. He caught hold of her left hand, awkwardly, nervously, but held it strongly with his close to his side, and went on speaking.