“What! Already you feel the spell of Beni-Mora, the desert spell! Yes, there is enchantment here--and so I never stay too long.” “For fear of what?” Count Anteoni was walking easily beside her. He walked from the hips, like many Sicilians, swaying very slightly, as if he liked to be aware how supple his body still was. As Domini spoke he stopped. They were now at a place where four paths joined, and could see four vistas of green and gold, of magical sunlight and shadow. “I scarcely know; of being carried who knows where--in mind or heart. Oh, there is danger in Beni-Mora, Madame, there is danger. This startling air is full of influences, of desert spirits.” He looked at her in a way she could not understand--but it made her think of the perfume-seller in his little dark room, and of the sudden sensation she had had that mystery coils, like a black serpent, in the shining heart of the East. “And now, Madame, which path shall we take? This one leads to my drawing-room, that on the right to the Moorish bath.” “And that?” “That one goes straight down to the wall that overlooks the Sahara.” “Please let us take it.” “The desert spirits are calling to you? But you are wise. What makes this garden remarkable is not its arrangement, the number and variety of its trees, but the fact that it lies flush with the Sahara--like a man’s thoughts of truth with Truth, perhaps.” He turned up the tail of the sentence and his harsh voice gave a little grating crack. “I don’t believe they are so different from one another as the garden and the desert.” She looked at him directly. “It would be too ironical.” “But nothing is,” the Count said. “You have discovered that in this garden?” “Ah, it is new to you, Madame!” For the first time there was a sound of faint bitterness in his voice. “One often discovers the saddest thing in the loveliest place,” he added. “There you begin to see the desert.” Far away, at the small orifice of the tunnel of trees down which they were walking, appeared a glaring patch of fierce and quivering sunlight. “I can only see the sun,” Domini said. “I know so well what it hides that I imagine I actually see the desert. One loves one’s kind, assiduous liar. Isn’t it so?” “The imagination? But perhaps I am not disposed to allow that it is a liar.” “Who knows? You may be right.” He looked at her kindly with his bright eyes. It had not seem to strike him that their conversation was curiously intimate, considering that they were strangers to one another, that he did not even know her name. Domini wondered suddenly how old he was. That look made him seem much older than he had seemed before. There was such an expression in his eyes as may sometimes be seen in eyes that look at a child who is kissing a rag doll with deep and determined affection. “Kiss your doll!” they seemed to say. “Put off the years when you must know that dolls can never return a kiss.”