She laughed. While she laughed De Trevignac noticed that Androvsky looked at her with a sort of sad intentness, not reproachful or wondering, as an older person might look at a child playing at the edge of some great gulf into which a false step would precipitate it. He strove to interpret this strange look, so obviously born in the face of his host in connection with himself. It seemed to him that he must have met Androvsky, and that Androvsky knew it, knew—what he did not yet know—where it was and when. It seemed to him, too, that Androvsky thought of him as the “something terrible” that had come to this woman who sat between them out of the desert.
But how could it be?
A profound curiosity was roused in him and he mentally cursed his treacherous memory—if it were treacherous. For possibly he might be mistaken. He had perhaps never met his host before, and this strange manner of his might be due to some inexplicable cause, or perhaps to some cause explicable and even commonplace. This Monsieur Androvsky might be a very jealous man, who had taken this woman away into the desert to monopolise her, and who resented even the chance intrusion of a stranger. De Trevignac knew life and the strange passions of men, knew that there are Europeans with the Arab temperament, who secretly long that their women should wear the veil and live secluded in the harem. Androvsky might be one of these.
When she had laughed Domini said:
“On the contrary, Monsieur, you have turned my thoughts into a happier current by your coming.”
“How so?”
“You made me think of what are called the little things of life that are more to us women than to you men, I suppose.”
“Ah,” he said. “This food, this wine, this chair with a cushion, this gay light—Madame, they are not little things I have to be grateful for. When I think of the dunes they seem to me—they seem—”
Suddenly he stopped. His gay voice was choked. She saw that there were tears in his blue eyes, which were fixed on her with an expression of ardent gratitude. He cleared his throat.
“Monsieur,” he said to Androvsky, “you will not think me presuming on an acquaintance formed in the desert if I say that till the end of my life I—and my men—can only think of Madame as of the good Goddess of the desolate Sahara!”