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?"
"The monk's liqueur, Madame?"
"What do you mean--monk's liqueur?"
"It was invented by a monk, Madame, and is sold by the monks of El-Largani."
"Oh! Have we any more of it?"
"There is another bottle, Madame, but I should not dare to bring it if----"
He paused.
"If what, Ouardi?"
"If Monsieur were there."
Domini was on the point of asking him why, but she checked herself and told him to leave her. Then she walked up and down once more on the sand. She was thinking now of the broken glass on the ground at Androvsky's feet when she found him alone in the tent after De Trevignac had gone. Ouardi's words made her wonder whether this liqueur, brought to celebrate De Trevignac's presence in the camp, had turned the conversation upon the subject of the religious orders; whether Androvsky had perhaps said something against them which had offended De Trevignac, a staunch Catholic; whether there had been a quarrel between the two men on the subject of religion. It was possible. She remembered De Trevignac's strange, almost mystical, gesture in the dawn, following his look of horror towards the tent where her husband lay sleeping.
To-night her mind--her whole nature--felt terribly alive.
She tried to think no more of Mogar, but her thoughts centred round it, linked it with this great city, whose lights shone in the distance below her, whose music came to her from afar over the silence of the sands.
Mogar and Amara; what had they to do with one another? Leagues of desert divided them. One was a desolation, the other was crowded with men. What linked them together in her mind?
