What was she singing about in that absurd little tinkling voice? Moonlight, and lovers, and lilies on the water? To a lot of degenerate money-grubbing Levantines? Through Gerard’s memory, to the tune which she sang was running a chain of names—names of places—names which Commandant Marnier had savagely strung together one night in the Mess; the names of the stages in that melancholy pilgrimage from which women do not return. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Toulon, Marseilles, Oran, Tangiers, Casablanca, and the Advanced Posts of the Legion. Yes, but the pilgrimage occupied a lifetime. What was this girl’s age? Was she nineteen or twenty? Not more, assuredly! How then had she come to the penultimate stage so soon? By what desperate circumstance of crime or ill-fortune? . . .

The song ceased and at once the clatter of voices broke out again. Madame Delagrange behind her bar poured out the drinks for three or four dark-skinned waiters dressed like Turks and a painted woman with worn eyes and wrinkles which no paint could hide minced out in her shabby, high-heeled dancing slippers to the officers on the verandah.

“Give me something to drink, dearie—I am dying of thirst,” she said, and she drew a chair to their table. Gerard de Montignac laughed brutally and would have driven her away, but Paul was quick to anticipate him. He had seen the woman flush under her paint when Gerard laughed.

“Of course,” he said at once. “What shall we all drink, Mademoiselle?”

She turned to him gratefully.

“If you will take my advice, the whiskey. The champagne—oh, never.”

“I can imagine it,” said Paul. “Chiefly sugar and sulphuric acid and mixed in the back yard,” and he laughed pleasantly to put the woman at her ease.

The one sure gain which had come to Paul from the destruction of his illusions was a hesitation in passing judgment upon people and estimating their values and characters. He had been so utterly mistaken once. He meant to go gently thereafter. And partly for that reason, partly because of an imagination which made him always want to stand behind the eyes of others and see what different things they looked out upon, from the things which he saw himself, there had grown up within that compassion and sympathy which Gerard de Montignac had noticed as dangerous qualities.

So although in truth he was more impatient than Gerard that this woman should 

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