and then he struck his fist upon the table. “But I can’t find out. I march at six o’clock to-morrow morning for Fez.”

“Your friend then,” Henriette suggested eagerly.

“Paul!” replied Gerard. “Yes. He has a few days still in Casablanca. He has compassion, he will help. I know him.”

Henriette’s face lightened a little.

“But he must be quick, very quick,” she urged. “You will see him to-night?”

“I will go to him now,” and Gerard remembered the letter in his pocket from Colonel Vanderfelt. “I was indeed on my way to him when I came here.”

Gerard looked at his watch. It was half past ten. He had stayed longer than he had intended at the Villa Iris.

CHAPTER X

Colonel Vanderfelt’s Letter

Gerard de Montignac found Paul still up and putting the last words to the report of long and solitary wanderings amongst the inland tribes. The report was to be despatched the next morning to the Bureau des Affaires Indigènes at Rabat, and Gerard waited in patience until the packet was sealed up. Then he burst out with his story of what had taken place on the night before at the Villa Iris. Paul listened without an interruption, but his face grew white with anger and his eyes burned, as he heard of Madame Delagrange’s coarse abuse and Marguerite’s tears and humiliations.

Gerard

G

“So you see, Paul, it was your fault in a way,” Gerard urged. “Of course sooner or later Petras Tetarnis—damn his soul!—would have presented his ultimatum, as he did last night, but you were the occasion of it being done.”

“Yes,” Paul agreed.

“Then you must find her. You must do what you can, send her home, give her a chance. I’ll start searching myself this very night. But you have more time and better means of discovering her.”

“Yes.”

Paul had knocked about Casablanca as a boy. He had many friends amongst the natives, and was accustomed to sit with them by the hour, drinking mint tea and exchanging jokes. He was a man of property besides in that town and could put out a great 

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