opened wide.

“You, too?”

“Yes. We are of the same race.”

She looked at his uniform.

“My mother was French, my father English. He took my mother’s nationality,” he said.

Marguerite suddenly stretched both her hands across the table to him in a swift abandonment.

“I am glad,” she said. “I come from Devonshire.”

“I from Sussex.”

“I from the county of broad moors and little valleys. You from—”; and some look upon his face checked her suddenly. “I have said something that hurts?” she asked remorsefully.

“No,” answered Paul, and for a few moments they were silent. To both of them this revelation that they were of the same race was no longer so much of a surprise as a portent. They were like travellers not quite sure that their feet were on their due appointed road, who come upon a sign post and know that they have made no mistake. These two had no doubt that they were upon their road of destiny, that this swift, unexpected friendship would lead them together into new countries where their lives would be fulfilled.

“Just to imagine if I had never come to the Villa Iris!” Paul exclaimed with a gasp of fear; so near he had been to not coming. But Marguerite’s eyelids drooped over her eyes and a look of doubt and sadness shadowed her face. Exaltations and hopes—here were bright things she dared hardly look upon, for if she once looked and took them to her heart, and found them false, what was merely grievous would no longer be endurable.

“It is a long way from Devonshire to Casablanca,” cried Paul, and Marguerite smiled.

“There’s a question very prettily put,” said she.

Her story was ordinary enough in its essentials. “Some families go up,” she said simply. “Others seem doomed to go right down and bring every member of them down too. Most English villages have an example, I think. Once and not so long ago they were well off and lived in their farm house. Now 

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