“Yes?” he said quickly. “Yes?”
“It’s very strange, Boris, but I cannot connect you with anything but the desert, or see you anywhere but in the desert. I cannot even imagine you among your vines in Tunisia.”
“They were not altogether mine,” he corrected, still with a certain excitement which he evidently endeavoured to repress. “I—I had the right, the duty of cultivating the land.”
“Well, however it was, you were always at work; you were responsible, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t see you even in the vineyards or the wheat-fields. Isn’t it strange?”
She was always looking at him with the same deep and wholly unselfconscious inquiry.
“And as to London, Paris—”
Suddenly she burst into a little laugh and her gravity vanished.
“I think you would hate them,” she said. “And they—they wouldn’t like you because they wouldn’t understand you.”