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This homely figure of her religion, beaming satisfaction and comfortable anticipation of friendly intercourse, laid to rest fears which only now, when she was conscious of relief, she knew she had been entertaining. She begged the priest to come into the dining-tent, and, taking up the little bell which was on the table, went out into the sand and rang it for Ouardi.
Ouardi smiled a broad welcome as they approached, and having made sure that his pose had been admired, retired to the cook's abode to fetch the teapot, while Batouch invited Domini and Androvsky to inspect the tent prepared for them. Domini assented with a dropped-out word. She still felt in a dream.
Between the fire and the tent she met Ouardi carrying a tray. On it were a coffee-pot, cups, little glasses and a tall bottle of a peculiar shape with a very thin neck and bulging sides. "What's that, Ouardi?" she asked, touching it with her finger. "That is an African liqueur, Madame, that you have never tasted. Batouch told me to bring it in honour of Monsieur the officer. They call it "
Dinner over, Domini left the two men together to smoke, and went out on to the sand. She met an Arab carrying coffee and a liqueur to the tent. "What's that, Ouardi?" she asked, touching the bottle. He told her it was an African liqueur. "Take it in," she said. And she strolled away to the bonfire to listen to the fantasia the Arabs were making in honour of the soldiers.
"I am not one of them," Androvsky said abruptly. "I have never felt so strong physically as since I have lived in the sand." The priest still looked at him closely, but said nothing further on the subject of health. Indeed, almost immediately his attention was distracted by the apparition of Ouardi bearing dishes from the cook's tent.
She had told Batouch and Ouardi that she wanted nothing more, that no one was to come to the tent again that night. The young moon was rising over the city, but its light as yet was faint. It fell upon the cupolas of the Bureau Arabe, the towers of the mosque and the white sands, whose whiteness it seemed to emphasise, making them pale as the face of one terror-stricken.
The table held a japanned tray with tea-cups, a milk jug and plates of biscuits and by it, in an attitude that looked deliberately picturesque stood Ouardi, the youth selected by Batouch to fill the office of butler in the desert.
He came at once, like a shadow gliding over the waste. "Bring us coffee for two, Ouardi, biscuits" she glanced at her visitor "bon-bons, yes, the bon-bons in the white box, and the cigars. And take the soldier with you and entertain him well. Give him whatever he likes."
The last sonorously joyous exclamation jumped out of Father Beret at the sight of Ouardi, who at this moment entered with a large tray, covered with a coffee-pot, cups, biscuits, bon-bons, cigars, and a bulging flask of some liqueur flanked by little glasses. "You fare generously in the desert I see, Madame," he exclaimed. "And so much the better. What's your servant's name?" Domini told him.
He takes the orders for the wines made at the monastery, and for for the what I made, Domini, when I was there." She thought of De Trevignac and the fragments of glass lying upon the ground in the tent at Mogar. "Had De Trevignac " she said in a low, inward voice. "He had seen me, spoken with me at the monastery. When Ouardi brought in the liqueur he remembered who I was."
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