He was silent for a moment. Then he said slowly:
"Then--then you did not wish--you did not mean to see me again before I went?"
"It was not that. I came to the garden--I had to come--I had to be alone."
"You want to be alone?" he said. "You want to be alone?"
Already the strength was dying out of his voice and face, and the old uneasiness was waking up in him. A dreadful expression of pain came into his eyes.
"Was that why you--you looked so happy?" he said in a harsh, trembling voice.
"When?"
"I stood for a long while looking at you when you were in there"--he pointed to the /fumoir/--"and your face was happy--your face was happy."
"Yes, I know."
"You will be happy alone?--alone in the desert?"
When he said that she felt suddenly the agony of the waterless spaces, the agony of the unpeopled wastes. Her whole spirit shrank and quivered, all the great joy of her love died within her. A moment before she had stood upon the heights of her heart. Now she shrank into its deepest, blackest abysses. She looked at him and said nothing.
"You will not be happy alone."
His voice no longer trembled. He caught hold of her left hand, awkwardly, nervously, but held it strongly with his close to his side, and went on speaking.
"Nobody is happy alone. Nothing is--men and women--children--animals."
A bird flew across the shadowy space under the trees, followed by another bird; he pointed to them; they disappeared. "The birds, too, they must have companionship. Everything wants a companion."
"Yes."
"But then--you will stay here alone in the desert?"
"What else can I do?" she said.
"And that journey," he went on, still holding her hand fast against his side, "Your journey into the desert--you will take it alone?"
"What else can I do?" she repeated in a lower voice.
It seemed to her that he was deliberately pressing her down into the uttermost darkness.
"You will not go."
"Yes, I shall go."
She spoke with conviction. Even in that moment--most of all in that moment--she knew that she would obey the summons of the desert.
"I--I shall never know the desert," he said. "I thought--it seemed to me that I, too, should go out into it. I have wanted to go. You have made me want to go."
"I?"
"Yes. Once you said to me that peace must dwell out there. It was on the tower the--the first time you ever spoke to me."
"I remember."
"I wondered--I often wonder why you spoke to me."
She knew he was looking at her with intensity, but she kept her eyes on the sand. There was something in them that she felt he must not see, a light that had just come into them as she realised that already, on the tower before she even knew him, she had loved him. It was that love, already born in her heart but as yet unconscious of its own existence, which had so strangely increased for her the magic of the African evening when she watched it with him. But before--suddenly she knew that she had loved Androvsky from the beginning, from the moment when his face looked at her as if out of the heart of the sun.