He paused, then added more quietly:
“What should he do here?”
“But, Monsieur, he is for the French officers.”
“There are French officers?”
“Yes, Monsieur, four or five, and the commandant. They live in the palace with the cupolas.”
“I forgot,” Androvsky said to Domini. “We are not out of the sphere of French influence. This place looks so remote and so barbarous that I imagined it given over entirely to the desert men.”
“We need not see the French,” she said. “We shall be encamped outside in the sand.”
“And we need not stay here long,” he said quickly.
“Boris,” she asked him, half in jest, half in earnest, “shall we buy a desert island to live in?”
“Let us buy an oasis,” he said. “That would be the perf—the safest life for us.”