" said Sanda. "You're giving up everything to this girl.
Do you think she will take it?"

"I wish I were as sure of what I shall do next as I am sure of that,"
laughed Max. If there had ever been any doubt in his mind as to
Josephine's attitude, it had vanished while listening to the talk of her
in the train.

"I know what you ought to do next," Sanda said. "You ought to be what
you have been--a soldier."

"I shall always be, at heart, I think," Max confessed. "But soldier life
is over for me, so far as I can see ahead."

"I wonder----" she began eagerly, then stopped abruptly.

"You wonder--what?"

"I daren't say it."

"Please dare."

"I mustn't. It would be wrong. I might be horribly sorry afterward. And
yet----"

She silenced herself with a little gasp. He urged her no more, but
stared almost unseeingly out of the window at the roofed farmhouses, and
the yellow hills, like reclaimed desert, with bright patches of
cultivation, and a far, floating background of the blue Thesala
mountains.

* * * * *

Sidi-bel-Abbes at last! and the train slowing down along the platform of
an insignificant station, which might have been in the South of France,
save for a few burnoused Arabs. There was a green glimpse of olives and
palms, and taller plane trees, under a serene sky; and in the distance
the high fortified walls of yellow and dark gray stone, which ringed in
the northernmost stronghold of the Foreign Legion.

"Sidi-bel-Abbes!" a deep voice shouted musically from one end of the
platform to the other, as the train came in; and the name thrilled
through Max Doran's veins as it had not ceased to thrill since
yesterday. More strongly than ever he had the impression that some great
things would happen to him here, or begin to happen, and carry him on
elsewhere, beyond those yellow hills. Deep down in him excitement
stirred in the dark, like a dazed traveller up before the dawn, groping
for the door through which he must pass to begin his journey. All the
more quietly, however, because of what he secretly felt, Max took
Sanda's bag and his own, and gave her a hand for the high step from the
train to platform. There they became units in a crowd strange to see at
a little provincial station; a crowd to be met at few other places in
the world.

The French boxer was not the only guest of importance this train brought
to Sidi-bel-Abbes. At the far end of the platform, where the first-cla