stairs near the front door. Madame, the landlady,
had laid aside her front and said her prayer to the Virgin. Monsieur,
the landlord, had muttered his last curse against the Jews and drunk
his last glass of rum. They snored like honest people recruiting their
strength for the morrow. In number two Suzanne Charpot, Domini's maid,
was dreaming of the Rue de Rivoli.

But Domini with wide-open eyes, was staring from her big, square pillow
at the red brick floor of her bedroom, on which stood various trunks
marked by the officials of the Douane. There were two windows in the
room looking out towards the Place de la Marine, below which lay the
station. Closed _persiennes_ of brownish-green, blistered wood protected
them. One of these windows was open. Yet the candle at Domini's bedside
burnt steadily. The night was warm and quiet, without wind.

As she lay there, Domini still felt the movement of the sea. The passage
had been a bad one. The ship, crammed with French recruits for the
African regiments, had pitched and rolled almost incessantly for
thirty-one hours, and Domini and most of the recruits had been ill.
Domini had had an inner cabin, with a skylight opening on to the lower
deck, and heard above the sound of the waves and winds their groans and
exclamations, rough laughter, and half-timid, half-defiant conversations
as she shook in her berth. At Marseilles she had seen them come on
board, one by one, dressed in every variety of poor costume, each one
looking anxiously around to see what the others were like, each one
carrying a mean yellow or black bag or a carefully-tied bundle. On the
wharf stood a Zouave, in tremendous red trousers and a fez, among great
heaps of dull brown woollen rugs. And as the recruits came hesitatingly
along he stopped them with a sharp word, examined the tickets they held
out, gave each one a rug, and pointed to the gangway that led from the
wharf to the vessel. Domini, then leaning over the rail of the upper
deck, had noticed the different expressions with which the recruits
looked at the Zouave. To all of them he was a phenomenon, a mystery of
Africa and of the new life for which they were embarking. He stood there
impudently and indifferently among the woollen rugs, his red fez pushed
well back on his short, black hair cut _en brosse_, his bronzed face
twisted into a grimace of fiery contempt, throwing, with his big and
muscular arms, rug after rug to the anxious young peasants who filed