a girl from being given to a man who isn't fit to kiss
her little embroidered shoes--bless them! To save her from him--or from
suicide. The letter told me she would rather die than marry him. That's
why I'm not in Paris to-night. There'd been other letters before; she
said in the one which reached me at the theatre--reached me in the
midst of rehearsal--thank God--if there is a God--I still have till the
end of September. The crisis won't come till then, on her seventeenth
birthday. But what is five months and a half to a man handicapped as I
am? Caught in a trap, and with hardly any money, just when I had a
fortune almost in my grasp!"

"I can lend you a little," said Max. "I've a few hundred dollars left."
He laughed. "It seems a lot here! These poor chaps look on me as a
millionaire, a sort of prince, because I've got something behind the
daily five centimes--some dollars to buy decent tobacco for my friends
and myself, and pay fellows to do my washing and so on--fellows wild
with joy to do it! Jove! It makes me feel a brute to think what a few
sous mean to them, gentlemen, some of 'em, who've lived a more luxurious
life than I have--and----"

"Maybe that's why they're here: because they lived too luxuriously--on
other people's money. Tell me, St. George, did you ever hear the name of
Manoeel Valdez?"

Max thought for an instant. "Valdez? Let me see ... how ... I know, a
singer! He sang last winter in New York, in something or other, a small
part, and I wasn't there, but I saw great notices. I remember now. Why,
you're----"

"Yes. You're right. Don't be afraid to speak. I asked for it."

"Then you _are_----"

"Manoeel Valdez. Saltenet, the man who wrote 'La Nailia,' wrote the man's
part for me, because he thought I could sing it, and because I
understand Arab music as maybe no other European does. I was brought up
in the desert. The girl I love is a daughter of the desert. God! How
that music they're playing makes me hear her call me, far away from
behind her ocean of dunes! There's a secret link binding our souls
together. Nothing can keep them apart. Saltenet was my benefactor. He
has done everything for me. He would have made my fortune--after I'd
made his; but that's human nature! And twelve nights ago I nearly killed
him because he wouldn't let me go when that girl called--my desert
princess! He vowed he'd have me arrested--anything to stop me. And he
tried to hold me by force. I knocked him down in his