ays till dawn; and the men who loved him
looked for wild flowers in the desert to lay upon it. He had forty days,
and forty nights, marching through the desert with the dead body of his
love, before they came to the railway. Then he took mother to France,
and left me with his two aunts there. Now do you wonder he never loved
me, or wanted to have me with him?"

"No, perhaps not," said Max. Deep sadness had fallen upon him. He was in
the desert with the man beside whose agony his own trial was as nothing.
All the world seemed to be full of sorrow and pain sharper than his own
personal pain. And as the girl asked her question and he answered it,
their cab passed the procession of recruits for the Foreign Legion,
tramping along between tall plane trees toward the town gate.

Once again a pair of tortured black eyes looked at Max, who winced as
the thick yellow dust from the wheels enveloped the marching men.

"Will you let me tell my father your story, as I have told you his?"
Sanda asked.

"Do as you think best," he said.

In another moment the cab had rolled past a few gardens and villas, a
green plateau and a moat, and passed through a great gateway. Overhead,
carved in the stone, were the words "Porte d'Oran," and the date, 1855.
Once, when the town was young, the gates had been kept tightly closed,
and through the loopholes in the stout, stone wall (the old part yellow,
the newer part gray) guns had been fired at besieging Arabs, the tribe
of the Beni Amer, who had worshipped at the shrine of the dead Saint,
Sidi-bel-Abbes. But all that was past long ago. No hope of fighting for
the Legionnaires, save over the frontier in Morocco, or far away in the
South! The shrine of Sidi-bel-Abbes stood neglected in the Arab
graveyard. Even the meaning of the name, once sacred to his followers,
was well-nigh forgotten; and all that was Arab in Sidi-bel-Abbes had
been relegated to the _Village Negre_, strictly forbidden as Blue
Beard's Room of Secrets, to the Soldiers of the Legion.

Inside the wall everything was modern and French, except for a few
trudging or labouring Arabs in white, or in gray burnouses of camel's
hair made in Morocco. As the daughter of the Legion's colonel drove
humbly in her shabby cab to the Hotel Splendide, she felt vaguely
depressed and disappointed in the town which she expected to be her
home. She had fancied that it would be very eastern, with mosques and
bazaars, and perhaps surrounded with dese