poor pilgrims! Here they have reached the last stage but one in their doleful Pilgrimage. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Oran, Tangiers, Casablanca and then up on the supply wagons to the advanced Posts of the Legion from which there is no return! Francine, Florette, Hortense—oh, the pretty names! Yes, that’s about all they have left when they reach this fine metropolis of Casablanca—their pretty names!”

He rose with a contemptuous movement from his chair, and Gerard de Montignac asked carelessly, with a mind far away from the subject.

“And what is the name of this girl?”

“Marguerite Lambert, an American,” replied Praslin, and close by Gerard, a young lieutenant of spahis who had disembarked that morning from Oran raised himself half out of his chair and sank back again.

“Do you know her, too?” Gerard asked.

“No,” replied the lieutenant. “Yet I have danced with her”; and he sat wondering not so much that Marguerite Lambert had come to Casablanca as that he should not have guessed after that short stay of hers at Oran that it was to Casablanca she must and would come.

Gerard de Montignac moved round the table to Henri Ratenay, an officer of his own regiment who had made the campaign of Chaiouïa with him and Ravenel.

“Shall we go to the Villa Iris?” he said.

Ratenay laughed and lifted his cap down from a peg.

“What! Has Praslin fired you? Let us go.”

But outside the long wooden building with its verandah of boards, Gerard de Montignac stopped. Marguerite Lambert roused no curiosity in him at this moment.

“A man from the Native Department called Baumann came from Rabat to-day to see the General. I hear that he has some news of Paul. He returns to Rabat to-morrow, but I was told that I might find him to-night at the Villa Iris. Let us go, then! For though I laugh, I am very anxious.”

Gerard de Montignac was an officer of a type not rare in the French Army. An aristocrat to his finger tips, a youth with one foot in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg and the other in the cafés of Montmartre, and contemptuous of politics, he had turned his back on Paris like so many of his kind and sought a career in the colonial army of France. He kept up a 

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