Paul had given no hint at the breakfast table of his plans, if indeed he had yet formed any, nor did his friends press him with any question. But they waited anxiously for letters and in time one came with the postmark of St. Germain. Paul had passed into St. Cyr. Others followed with lively enough accounts of his surroundings and companions. Here and there the name of a friend was mentioned, Gerard de Montignac, Paul’s senior by a year, for instance, who cropped up more often than any one else.

They heard later that he had passed out with honours and was now a sub-lieutenant in the 174th Regiment, stationed at Marseilles; then a couple of years later, just at the time when Phyllis was married, that he had been seconded to the 2nd Tirailleurs and was on active service amongst the Beni-Snassen in Algeria. He escaped from that campaign without any hurt and wrote a little account of it to his friends at King’s Corner, with some shrewd pictures of his commanders and brother officers. But the same reticence overspread the pages. Mrs. Vanderfelt was at a loss to recapture out of them a picture of the lad who had stayed one night with them and borne so gallantly the destruction of his boyish illusions. The letters, to her thinking, might have been written by an automaton with a brain.

A few months afterwards Colonel Vanderfelt slammed down his newspaper on the breakfast table.

“That’s where Paul ought to be. I told him! You can’t blame me! I told him!”

The long-expected trouble in Morocco was coming to a head. The extravagance and incapacity of the Sultan Abd-el-Aziz; the concession of the Customs to the French; the jealousies of powerful kaids; and the queer admixture of contempt and fear with which the tribes watched the encroachments of Europeans; all these elements were setting the country on fire. Already there were rumours of disorder in the wealthy coast town of Casablanca.

“That’s where Paul ought to be,” cried Colonel Vanderfelt angrily. But his anger was appeased in a couple of days. For he received a letter from Paul with the postmark of Oran, written on shipboard. He and his battalion were on their way to Casablanca.

They arrived after the bombardment and massacres, and served under General D’Amade throughout the campaigns of the Chaiouïa. Paul was wounded in the thigh during the attack upon Settat but was able to rejoin his battalion in a month. He was now a senior Lieutenant and his captain being killed in the fight at McKoun, he commanded his company until 

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