and he walked with the light ease of a young animal.  After he had gone he turned his head once and stared full at Domini.  She could not help laughing at the vanity and consciousness of his expression.  It was childish.  Yet there was something ruthless and wicked in it too.  As he came up to the stranger the latter looked round, said something to him, and then hastened forward.  Domini was struck by the difference between their gaits.  For the stranger, although he was so strongly built and muscular, walked rather heavily and awkwardly, with a peculiar shuffling motion of his feet.  She began to wonder how old he was.  About thirty-five or thirty-seven, she thought.

“That is Hadj,” said Batouch in his soft, rich voice.

“Hadj?”

“Yes.  He is my cousin.  He lives in Beni-Mora, but he, too, has been in Paris.  He has been in prison too.”

“What for?”

“Stabbing.”

Batouch gave this piece of information with quiet indifference, and continued

“He likes to laugh.  He is lazy.  He has earned a great deal of money, and now he has none.  To-night he is very gay, because he has a client.”

“I see.  Then he is a guide?”

“Many people in Beni-Mora are guides.  But Hadj is always lucky in getting the English.”

“That man with him isn’t English!” Domini exclaimed.

She had wondered what the traveller’s nationality was, but it had never occurred to her that it might be the same as her own.

“Yes, he is.  And he is going to the Hotel du Desert.  You and he are the only English here, and almost the only travellers.  It is too early for many travellers yet.  They fear the heat.  And besides, few English come here now.  What a pity!  They spend money, and like to see everything.  Hadj is very anxious to buy a costume at Tunis for the great fete at the end of Ramadan.  It will cost fifty or sixty francs.  He hopes the Englishman is rich.  But all the English are rich and generous.”

Here Batouch looked steadily at Domini with his large, unconcerned eyes.

“This one speaks Arabic a little.”

Domini made no reply.  She was surprised by this piece of information.  There was something, she thought, essentially un-English about the stranger.  He was certainly not dressed by an English tailor.  But it was not only that which had caused her mistake.  His whole air and look, his manner of holding himself, of sitting, of walking—­yes, especially of walking—­were surely foreign.  Yet, when she came to think about it, she could not say that they were characteristic of any other country.  Idly she had said to herself that the stranger might be an Austrian or a Russian.  But she had been thinking of his colouring.  It happened that two attaches of those two nations, whom she had met frequently in London, had hair of that shade of rather warm brown.

“He does not look like an Englishman,” she said presently.