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"All's right with the world, and now for a wash and food!" cried Nevill, turning in with a sigh of relief at the gate of the bordj. "But oh, by the way Hamish has got a letter for you or is it Angus? Anyhow, it's from my fairy aunt, which I would envy you, if she hadn't sent me on something better a post-card from Tlemcen.
In the car, she had laughed at the women muffled in their haïcks, saying that as the men of Tlemcen were so tyrannical about hiding female faces, it was strange they did not veil the hens and cows.
I feel inclined to go up to the retired Colonels and elderly maiden ladies, who seem to form the majority of my fellow-guests, and pinch them and ask them whether they are real, or, like Papadopoulos and Saupiquet, the gentler creatures of a nightmare. Well, I have written to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the 3rd Regiment of Chasseurs at Tlemcen, which is away down by the Morocco frontier.
He now called himself the King of Algiers, but still that lean, sun-dried garrison held with desperate tenacity to the tower of the redoubtable Navarro, and any moment a fresh Spanish relieving force might be upon him and chase him forth even as Uruj had been chased from Tlemcen.
Christendom was completely bewildered: hitherto the relations between the nations and the Kings of Tunis, Tlemcen, Fez, and others of the North African potentates, had been of the most agreeable description. Both parties had denounced piracy, and had as far as in them lay done all in their power to discourage this form of robbery.
I kept the little one, notwithstanding the five months of march we must make, before returning to Tlemcen. She had grown gentle, was inclined to be mischievous, but was yielding and almost affectionate with me. She ate with the rest, never wanting to sit down, but running from one to another around the table.
Cherry blossoms fell in scented snow over their heads as the car ran back to Tlemcen, and out once more, through the Moorish Porte de Fez, past the reservoir built by a king for an Arab beauty to sail her boats upon. Sunset was near, and the sky blazed red as if Mansourah burned with ten thousand torches.
"What a shame you never told me that before. The time I've wasted!" exclaimed Nevill. "But I'll make up for it now. Thank Heaven I'm superstitious." They had forgotten Stephen, and laughing into each other's eyes, were perfectly happy for the moment. Stephen was glad, yet he felt vaguely resentful that they could forget the girl for whose sake the journey to Tlemcen had ostensibly been undertaken.
I might, of course, write to the Lieutenant-Colonel of the 3rd Regiment at Tlemcen, and wait for his reply. But even if he answered by return of post, I should have to remain in Paris for nearly a week. "That," said I, wiping from my face half a teacupful of liquid mud which had squirted in through the cab window "that I'll never do. I'll proceed at once to Algiers.
And he was in love with a teacher of Arab children far away in Tlemcen, a girl "poor as a church mouse," who wouldn't listen to him! It was a quaint world; as quaint in Africa as elsewhere. "What did you tell Miss Ray?" Nevill hurried to ask. "That Ben Halim had left Algiers nine years ago, and had never been heard of since.
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