some garrison in the desert. I should like to bang their noisy heads together.”

Paul laughed at his friend’s indignation.

“All wars fatten the carrion birds, but it isn’t for the carrion birds that they are fought,” he said, and in the saloon all the voices ceased.

Gerard de Montignac swung round again in his chair. The men who had been standing about the big table had taken their seats and on the far side of it, almost facing the doorway and the two officers beyond in the dark of the verandah, a girl was standing. Gerard uttered a little cry, so startled was he by her aspect, by the sharp contrast between her delicacy and the squalor of her company. He heard Paul Ravenel move behind him, but he did not turn. His eyes were drawn to that slight figure and held by it.

“Marguerite Lambert,” he whispered to himself. There she stood, looking straight out through the doorway towards them. Could she see them, he wondered. Why was she standing there in view before that crowd, in this dustbin of Casablanca? It was wrong.

The piano sounded a note and Marguerite Lambert began to sing. But she could not sing—that was evident from the first bar. A tiny voice, which even in that silence hardly reached to the two men on the verandah, clear and gentle but with no range of music in it. It was like a child singing and an untrained child without any gift for singing. As singing it was ridiculous. Yet Gerard de Montignac neither laughed, nor could withdraw his eyes. He even held his breath, and of her singing he was altogether unaware.

She was pretty—yes, but too thin, and with eyes unnaturally large for her face. She was fresh: yes, strangely fresh for that place of squalor and withered flowers. And she was young, so that she stood apart from the other women like a jewel amongst pebbles. But it was not her beauty which arrested him, nor some indefinable air of good breeding which she had, but—and when she was halfway through her little song Gerard reached the explanation in his analysis—a queer look of fatality. Yes, a fatal look as though she was predestined to something out of the common, greater joys perhaps or greater sufferings, a bigger destiny than falls to the ordinary lot.

Gerard de Montignac had all the Frenchman’s passion for classing people in their proper categories, and his knack, as soon as that was done, of losing all interest in them. He was unable to place the girl in hers.

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