“Do speak.”
“That guest of mine yesterday—”
“Monsieur Androvsky?”
“Yes. He interested me enormously, profoundly.”
“Really! Yet he was at his worst yesterday.”
“Perhaps that was why. At any rate, he interested me more than any man I have seen for years. But—” He paused, looking in at the little chamber where the dog kept guard.
“But my interest was complicated by a feeling that I was face to face with a human being who was at odds with life, with himself, even with his Creator—a man who had done what the Arabs never do—defied Allah in Allah’s garden.”
“Oh!”
She uttered a little exclamation of pain. It seemed to her that he was gathering up and was expressing scattered, half formless thoughts of hers.
“You know,” he continued, looking more steadily into the room of the dog, “that in Algeria there is a floating population composed of many mixed elements. I could tell you strange stories of tragedies that have occurred in this land, even here in Beni-Mora, tragedies of violence, of greed, of—tragedies that were not brought about by Arabs.”