“foot-cavalry” they had marched and fought and straightway marched again until the swift pounce upon the great camp of Bou Nuallah had put the seal upon their victories. Settat, M’Kown, Sidi el Mekhi, the R’Fakha, the M’Karto—those had been royal days of friendship and battle, and endurance, and the memory of the week at Fontainebleau could only live in shame beside them.

Gerard de Montignac’s careless words had suddenly set Paul upon this train of thought, so that he forgot for a moment his friend’s presence in the room. He had not changed his plans—he found himself putting that question silently. No, he still meant to go back to his own home and race and name. He was not of those to whom Eastern lands and Eastern climes make so searching an appeal that they can never afterwards be happy anywhere else. He was a true child of the grey skies, and he meant in due time to live under them. But the actual date for that migration had been pushed off to a misty day. He put his cap on his head.

“Come, let us sample your Villa Iris,” he said; and the two friends walked across Casablanca to the green, dark-shuttered house.

The Bar was full and the piano doing its worst. Above the babel of voices, every harsh note of it hurt like a tap upon a live brain. Paul and Gerard de Montignac were the only two in uniform there that night. A few small officials of the French business companies, Greeks, Italians, nondescripts from the Levant, and Jews, who three years before, paddling barefoot in the filth of their Mellah, were the only people to shout “Vive la France,” as the troops marched through Casablanca—these made up the company of the Villa Iris.

Gerard de Montignac looked about the room. At a big table at the end, a little crowd of these revellers, dandies in broadcloth and yellow, buttoned boots, were raising a din as they drank, some standing and gesticulating, others perched on high stools, and all talking at the top of their high, shrill voices. Half-a-dozen women in bedraggled costumes covered with spangles which had once done duty in the outlying Music Halls of Paris were dancing with their partners in front of the tables. But Gerard could not believe that any one of them could have cost even little Boutreau of the Legion five minutes of his ordinary ration of sleep.

“She may be outside,” said Gerard. “Let us see!”

He made his way between the tables, crossed the open space of floor and went out through the wide doorway on the big verandah. Paul followed him. The verandah 

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