As they came out on the pale riband of sand which circled the little room Domini said: “How wild and extraordinary that tune is!” “Larbi’s. I suppose it is, but no African music seems strange to me. I was born on my father’s estate, near Tunis. He was a Sicilian; but came to North Africa each winter. I have always heard the tomtoms and the pipes, and I know nearly all the desert songs of the nomads.” “This is a love-song, isn’t it?” “Yes. Larbi is always in love, they tell me. Each new dancer catches him in her net. Happy Larbi!” “Because he can love so easily?” “Or unlove so easily. Look at him, Madame.” At a little distance, under a big banana tree, and half hidden by clumps of scarlet geraniums, Domini saw a huge and very ugly Arab, with an almost black skin, squatting on his heels, with a long yellow and red flute between his thick lips. His eyes were bent down, and he did not see them, but went on busily playing, drawing from his flute coquettish phrases with his big and bony fingers. “And I pay him so much a week all the year round for doing that,” the Count said. His grating voice sounded kind and amused. They walked on, and Larbi’s tune died gradually away. “Somehow I can’t be angry with the follies and vices of the Arabs,” the Count continued. “I love them as they are; idle, absurdly amorous, quick to shed blood, gay as children, whimsical as--well, Madame, were I talking to a man I might dare to say pretty women.” “Why not?” “I will, then. I glory in their ingrained contempt of civilisation. But I like them to say their prayers five times in the day as it is commanded, and no Arab who touches alcohol in defiance of the Prophet’s law sets foot in my garden.” There was a touch of harshness in his voice as he said the last words, the sound of the autocrat. Somehow Domini liked it. This man had convictions, and strong ones. That was certain. There was something oddly unconventional in him which something in her responded to. He was perfectly polite, and yet, she was quite sure, absolutely careless of opinion. Certainly he was very much a man. “It is pleasant, too,” he resumed, after a slight pause, “to be surrounded by absolutely thoughtless people with thoughtful faces and mysterious eyes--wells without truth at the bottom of them.” She laughed. “No one must think here but you!” “I prefer to keep all the folly to myself. Is not that a grand cocoanut?” He pointed to a tree so tall that it seemed soaring to heaven. “Yes, indeed. Like the one that presides over the purple dog.” “You have seen my fetish?” “Smain showed him to me, with reverence.” “Oh, he is king here. The Arabs declare that on moonlight nights they have heard him joining in the chorus of the Kabyle dogs.” “You speak almost as if you believed it.” “Well, I believe more here than I believe anywhere else. That is partly why I come here.” “I can understand that--I mean believing much here.”