At the Consulate he found three packages of mail. He hurried to a hotel and opened them eagerly. There was only one letter from Mabel, hardly more than a note. Yetta, she wrote, had told her that he had started homeward. She hoped the Expedition had been successful. She would be glad to see him again. She was, as usual, very busy, but both she and Eleanor were well. What a fool he had been made by hope! He had not been able to accept her definite refusals--he remembered them all now. These three years he had shut his eyes to reality and had lived in a baseless hope. A man needs something more than routine work to keep him going. In all the idle moments scattered through his busy, exciting life--the minutes before he fell asleep, the times some jackal's cry had waked him in the night, all the intervals of waiting--he had thought of Mabel. And always he had asked himself if their long intimacy was to lead to nothingness. It seemed impossible. Surely she would feel his absence, miss him from her life and want him back. His friendship must have meant something to her. She was proud and hard to change. But time would work the miracle. She would call to him. It seemed to be written in the stars, in the glory of the desert dawns, in the haunting afterglows of the sunset. The last months this dream had been more concrete than any reality. When he reached Paris after his long exile, he would find her summons. Perhaps she would come there to meet him. There was only this cold and formal note. In his barren hotel room he sounded the very depths of loneliness. Of all his recent comrades he alone was unwelcomed. He thought of the dainty Marquise d'Hauteville and her children. They had stopped off at Semmering in the Austrian Alps. He did not know where the Bertholets were celebrating their reunion. Beckmeyer and his Gretchen had gone up to their village home on the edge of the Black Forest. And somewhere on the side of _La Butte joyeuse_, Delanoue and Vibert were finding companionship and a hearty welcome. Here he was in his dismal hotel room, alone with the Dead Hope he could not forget, a misfit, a mistake--_une vie manquée_. The winter night fell over Paris, but he was too gloomy to notice the darkness. It was the cold which at last stung into his consciousness. He went to bed like a man who had been drugged. The next morning he was awakened by a batch of reporters. Somehow the news that the Expedition had returned had leaked out. The reporters had heard some vague rumors of "the siege" when for two weeks the fanatics had attacked the camp, and how Walter, dressed in native clothes, had slipped through the lines and brought relief. But he refused to talk, taking refuge behind the etiquette which requires subordinates to hold their peace until the chief has spoken.