hough she was being cruelly maligned, she wished, as a proof
of her admiration for Max's desert exploits, to present him with all her
French property, the magnificent old vineyard-surrounded Chateau de la
Tour, where he could cultivate grapes and make his fortune.

The papers pointed out that this was something like sending coals to
Newcastle, as St. George, alias Doran, was debarred from entering France
unless he wanted to go to prison. But Josephine and Grant quickly
retorted that the recipient of their bounty need not live in France in
order to benefit. He could sell or let the Chateau de la Tour through
some agent.

Not an echo of all this play of cross purposes reached Max at the
nursing home in Cairo, where he had been carried by Sanda's orders after
breaking down. But Sanda, who took in a dozen papers to see what they
had to say about the "deserter," read what was going on at New York as
well as in Rome and at Sidi-bel-Abbes. She saw that Max had been
presented with estates in France by the woman who had taken everything
and given nothing; and because of queer things Max had let drop in his
delirium she understood more of the past than he would have revealed of
his own free will. For one thing, she learnt that a certain Jack and
Rose Doran had had a child born to them at the Chateau de la Tour. This
enabled her to put other things together in her mind, and loving Max as
she did, she saw no harm in thus using her wits, while she respected him
with all her heart for not telling the secret. Besides, she had met
Captain de la Tour in Sidi-bel-Abbes, and she had guessed that it was
partly because of him and one or two others like him that her father had
sent her to the Agha's rather than leave her at Bel-Abbes alone.

"It would be the most wonderful sort of poetic justice," she reflected,
sitting at Max's bedside one day while he slept, "if the old place of
his ancestors should come back to him at last."

This thought reminded her of her plan. Not that she ever forgot it; but
she had to put it into the background of her mind until she was sure
that Max was going to get well. Until then, she could not and would not
leave him. But at last she was sure; and she was waiting only to find
out if her father could help; or if not, till his leave was over and she
was left to act for herself without compromising the Legion's colonel.

If Sanda had loved her father in their days together at Bel-Abbes, she
loved him a thousan