before he went to West Point. They
had motored from Paris to the Riviera, and stayed in Nice. Then they
had come back to Marseilles, and had taken the best cabins on board a
great liner, for Egypt. What fun he and the other boy of the party had
had! He felt now that, however things turned out, the fun of life was
over.

If the girl, Josephine Delatour, lived, he would have to leave the army;
that was clear. Grant Reeves had shown him why. And it would be hard,
for he loved soldiering. He could think willingly of no other profession
or even business. Yet somewhere, somehow, he would have to begin at the
bottom and work up. Besides, there were his real parents to be thought
of, if they were still alive. Max felt that perhaps he was hard--or
worse still, snobbish--not to feel any instinctive affection for them.
His mother had sold him, in order that she might have money to go to her
husband, whom she loved so much better than her child. Well, at least
she had a heart! That was something. And if the pair still kept a little
hotel, what of that? Was he such a mean wretch as to be ashamed because
he was the son of a small hotel-keeper? Max began spying out in himself
his faults and weaknesses, which, while he was happy and fortunate, he
had never suspected. And now and then he caught the words running
through his mind: "If only she is dead, the whole thing will be no more
than a bad dream." What a cad he was! he thought. And even if she were
dead, nothing could ever be as it had been. Jack Doran was not his
father, and he would have no right to anything that had been Jack's, not
even his love. If he kept the money it would not make him happy. He
could never be happy again.

It was in this mood that he went on board the _General Morel_, the
oldest and worst-built ship of her line. She was carrying a crowd of
second-class passengers for Algiers, and the worried stewards had no
time to attend to him. He found his own cabin, by the number on his
ticket, groping through a long, dark corridor, which smelt of food and
bilge water. The stateroom was as gloomy as the passage leading to it,
and he congratulated himself that at least he had the lower berth.

His roommate, however, had been in before him, and either through
ignorance or impudence had annexed Max's bunk for himself. On the
roughly laundered coverlet was a miniature brown kitbag, conspicuously
new looking. It had been carelessly left open, or had sprung open of
itself,