She passed him, but was unable to do so without touching him.  Her left arm was hanging down, and her bare hand knocked against the back of the hand in which he held his hat.  She felt as if at that moment she touched a furnace, and she saw him shiver slightly, as over-fatigued men sometimes shiver in daylight.  An extraordinary, almost motherly, sensation of pity for him came over her.  She did not know why.  The intense heat of his hand, the shiver that ran over his body, his attitude as he shrank with a kind of timid, yet ferocious, politeness against the white wall, the expression in his eyes when their hands touched—­a look she could not analyse, but which seemed to hold a mingling of wistfulness and repellance, as of a being stretching out arms for succour, and crying at the same time, “Don’t draw near to me!  Leave me to myself!”—­everything about him moved her.  She felt that she was face to face with a solitariness of soul such as she had never encountered before, a solitariness that was cruel, that was weighed down with agony.  And directly she had passed the man and thanked him formally she stopped with her usual decision of manner.  She had abruptly made up her mind to talk to him.  He was already moving to turn away.  She spoke quickly, and in French.

“Isn’t it wonderful here?” she said; and she made her voice rather loud, and almost sharp, to arrest his attention.

He turned round swiftly, yet somehow reluctantly, looked at her anxiously, and seemed doubtful whether he would reply.

After a silence that was short, but that seemed, and in such circumstances was, long, he answered, in French: 

“Very wonderful, Madame.”

The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him.  He stood as if he had heard an unusual noise which had alarmed him, and looked at Domini as if he expected that she would share in his sensation.  Very quietly and deliberately she leaned her arms again on the parapet and spoke to him once more.

“We seem to be the only travellers here.”

The man’s attitude became slightly calmer.  He looked less momentary, less as if he were in haste to go, but still shy, fierce and extraordinarily unconventional.

“Yes, Madame; there are not many here.”

After a pause, and with an uncertain accent, he added: 

“Pardon, Madame—­for yesterday.”

There was a sudden simplicity, almost like that of a child, in the sound of his voice as he said that.  Domini knew at once that he alluded to the incident at the station of El-Akbara, that he was trying to make amends.  The way he did it touched her curiously.  She felt inclined to stretch out her hand to him and say, “Of course!  Shake hands on it!” almost as an honest schoolboy might.  But she only answered: 

“I know it was only an accident.  Don’t think of it any more.”

She did not look at him.

“Where money is concerned the Arabs are very persistent,” she continued.