“If you ask me to.”

“I do ask you.”

“Then——?”

“Do you see me in this garden any more?”

A voice answered: 

“No.”

It was her own, yet it seemed another’s voice, with which she had nothing to do.

A great feeling of sorrow swept over her as she heard it.

“Do come back!” she said.

The Count had got up.  The brightness of his eyes was obscured.

“If not here, we shall meet again,” he said slowly.

“Where?”

“In the desert.”

“Did the Diviner—?  No, don’t tell me.”

She got up too.

“It is time for you to start?”

“Nearly.”

A sort of constraint had settled over them.  She felt it painfully for a moment.  Did it proceed from something in his mind or in hers?  She could not tell.  They walked slowly down one of the little paths and presently found themselves before the room in which sat the purple dog.

“If I am never to come back I must say good-bye to him,” the Count said.

“But you will come back.”

“That voice said ‘No.’”

“It was a lying voice.”

“Perhaps.”

They looked in at the window and met the ferocious eyes of the dog.

“And if I never come back will he bay the moon for his old master?” said the Count with a whimsical, yet sad, smile.  “I put him here.  And will these trees, many of which I planted, whisper a regret?  Absurd, isn’t it, Miss Enfilden?  I never can feel that the growing things in my garden do not know me as I know them.”

“Someone will regret you if—­”

“Will you?  Will you really?”

“Yes.”

“I believe it.”

He looked at her.  She could see, by the expression of his eyes, that he was on the point of saying something, but was held back by some fighting sensation, perhaps by some reserve.

“What is it?”

“May I speak frankly to you without offence?” he asked.  “I am really rather old, you know.”

“Do speak.”

“That guest of mine yesterday—­”

“Monsieur Androvsky?”

“Yes.  He interested me enormously, profoundly.”

“Really!  Yet he was at his worst yesterday.”

“Perhaps that was why.  At any rate, he interested me more than any man I have seen for years.  But—­” He paused, looking in at the little chamber where the dog kept guard.

“But my interest was complicated by a feeling that I was face to face with a human being who was at odds with life, with himself, even with his Creator—­a man who had done what the Arabs never do—­defied Allah in Allah’s garden.”

“Oh!”

She uttered a little exclamation of pain.  It seemed to her that he was gathering up and was expressing scattered, half formless thoughts of hers.

“You know,” he continued, looking more steadily into the room of the dog, “that in Algeria there is a floating population composed of many mixed elements.  I could tell you strange stories of tragedies that have occurred in this land, even here in Beni-Mora, tragedies of violence, of greed, of—­tragedies that were not brought about by Arabs.”