He still looked steadily at the rings of smoke curling up into the golden air. There was in his voice a sound of embarrassment. She guessed that it came from the consciousness of the pain he must have caused the good priest who had loved him when he ceased from practising the religion in which he had been brought up. Even to her he never spoke frankly on religious subjects, but she knew that he had been baptised a Catholic and been educated for a time by priests. She knew, too, that he was no longer a practising Catholic, and that, for some reason, he dreaded any intimacy with priests. He never spoke against them. He had scarcely ever spoken of them to her. But she remembered his words in the garden, “I do not care for priests.” She remembered, too, his action in the tunnel on the day of his arrival in Beni-Mora. And the reticence that they both preserved on the subject of religion, and its reason, were the only causes of regret in this desert dream of hers. Even this regret, too, often faded in hope. For in the desert, the Garden of Allah, she had it borne in upon her that Androvsky would discover what he must surely secretly be seeking--the truth that each man must find for himself, truth for him of the eventual existence in which the mysteries of this present existence will be made plain, and of the Power that has fashioned all things. And she was able to hope in silence, as women do for the men they love. “Don’t think I do not realise that you have worked,” she went on after a pause. “You told me how you always cultivated the land yourself, even when you were still a boy, that you directed the Spanish labourers in the vineyards, that--you have earned a long holiday. But should it last for ever?” “You are right. Well, let us take an oasis; let us become palm gardeners like that Frenchman at Meskoutine.” “And build ourselves an African house, white, with a terrace roof.” “And sell our dates. We can give employment to the Arabs. We can choose the poorest. We can improve their lives. After all, if we owe a debt to anyone it is to them, to the desert. Let us pay our debt to the desert men and live in the desert.” “It would be an ideal life,” she said with her eyes shining on his. “And a possible life. Let us live it. I could not bear to leave the desert. Where should we go?” “Where should we go!” she repeated. She was still looking at him, but now the expression of her eyes had quite changed. They had become grave, and examined him seriously with a sort of deep inquiry. He sat upon the Arab rug, leaning his back against the wall of the traveller’s house. “Why do you look at me like that, Domini?” he asked with a sudden stirring of something that was like uneasiness. “I! I was wondering what you would like, what other life would suit you.” “Yes?” he said quickly. “Yes?”