“Why?” “Can anything be lifelong--even our honeymoon?” “Suppose we choose that it shall be?” “Can we choose such a thing? Is anybody allowed to choose to live always quite happily without duties? Sometimes I wonder. I love this wandering life so much, I am so happy in it, that I sometimes think it cannot last much longer.” He began to sift the sand through his fingers swiftly. “Duties?” he said in a low voice. “Yes. Oughtn’t we to do something presently, something besides being happy?” “What do you mean, Domini?” “I hardly know, I don’t know. You tell me.” There was an urging in her voice, as if she wanted, almost demanded, something of him. “You mean that a man must do some work in his life if he is to keep himself a man,” he said, not as if he were asking a question. He spoke reluctantly but firmly. “You know,” he added, “that I have worked hard all my life, hard like a labourer.” “Yes, I know,” she said. She stroked his hand, that was worn and rough, and spoke eloquently of manual toil it had accomplished in the past. “I know. Before we were married, that day when we sat in the garden, you told me your life and I told you mine. How different they have been!” “Yes,” he said. He lit a cigar and watched the smoke curling up into the gold of the sunlit atmosphere. “Mine in the midst of the world and yours so far away from it. I often imagine that little place, El Krori, the garden, your brother, your twin-brother Stephen, that one-eyed Arab servant--what was his name?” “El Magin.” “Yes, El Magin, who taught you to play Cora and to sing Arab songs, and to eat cous-cous with your fingers. I can almost see Father Andre, from whom you learnt to love the Classics, and who talked to you of philosophy. He’s dead too, isn’t he, like your mother?” “I don’t know whether Pere Andre is dead. I have lost sight of him,” Androvsky said.