e columns to the story. Somehow, snapshots of Max
St. George, as well as several of Sanda, had been snatched by
enterprising journalists before St. George fell ill in Cairo. These were
telegraphed for and bought by newspapers of England, Spain, Italy,
France, America, Algeria, and even Germany, which had not loved Stanton.
The next thing that happened was the report in Algerian papers that Max
St. George, "_le jeune homme de mystere_," was a missing soldier of the
Legion, who had deserted from an important mission to join Stanton's
caravan. Sensation everywhere! Paragraphs reminding the public of a
curious fact: that young Mrs. Stanton was the daughter of the colonel of
the Legion. Strange if she had not known from the first that the recruit
to her husband's expedition was a deserter from her father's regiment.
And what a situation for the colonel himself! His daughter protected
during a long desert journey of incalculable peril by a man whom it
would be her father's duty to have arrested and court-martialled if he
were on French soil.

Journalists argued the delicate question, whether, in the circumstances,
it would be possible for Colonel DeLisle to do anything officially
toward obtaining a pardon for St. George--whose name probably was not
St. George, since no man wore anything so obvious as his own name in the
Foreign Legion. Retired officers wrote letters to the papers and pointed
out that for DeLisle to work in St. George's favour, simply because
accident had enabled the deserter to aid a member of his colonel's
family, would be inadmissible. If St. George were the right sort of man
and soldier he would not expect or wish it. As a matter of fact, he did
neither; but then, at the time, he was in a physical state which
precluded conscious wishes and expectations. He did not know or care
what happened; though sometimes, in intervals of seeing marvellous
mirages of the Lost Oasis, and fighting robbers, or prescribing for sick
camels, he appeared vaguely to recognize the face of his nurse; not the
professional, but the amateur. "Sanda, Sanda!" he would mutter, or cry
out aloud; but as fortunately no one knew that Mrs. Stanton, _nee_
Corisande DeLisle, was called "Sanda" by those who loved her, the doctor
and the professional nurse supposed he was babbling about the sand of
the desert. He had certainly had a distressing amount of it!

Max would have been immensely interested if he could have known at this
time of three