After dinner Batouch came to the tent to suggest that they should go down with him into the city. Domini, feeling certain that Androvsky would not wish to go, at once refused, alleging that she was tired. Batouch then asked Androvsky to go with him, and, to Domini’s astonishment, he said that if she did not mind his leaving her for a short time he would like a stroll.
“Perhaps,” he said to her, as Batouch and he were starting, “perhaps it will make me more completely human; perhaps there is something still to be done that even you, Domini, have not accomplished.”
She knew he was alluding to her words before dinner. He stood looking at her with a slight smile that did not suggest happiness, then added:
“That link you spoke of between us and these strangers”—he made a gesture towards the city—“I ought perhaps to feel it more strongly than I do. I—I will try to feel it.”
Then he turned away, and went with Batouch across the sand-hills, walking heavily.
As Domini watched him going she felt chilled, because there was something in his manner, in his smile, that seemed for the moment to set them apart from each other, something she did not understand.
Soon Androvsky disappeared in a fold of the sands as he had disappeared in a fold of the sands at Mogar, not long before De Trevignac came. She thought of Mogar once more, steadily, reviewing mentally—with the renewed sharpness of intellect that had returned to her, brought by contact with the city—all that had passed there, as she never reviewed it before.
It had been a strange episode.
She began to walk slowly up and down on the sand before the tent. Ouardi came to walk with her, but she sent him away. Before doing so, however, something moved her to ask him:
“That African liqueur, Ouardi—you remember that you brought to the tent at Mogar—have we any more of it?”