That evening he was to meet her on the ramparts, and at sunset there he was true to time, and he had scarcely been waiting five minutes when she appeared, dressed as he had never seen her before, with a lace mantilla covering her shapely head. It was a lonely spot that they had chosen, giving a view over the country towards the west. When he took the covering off the cage and showed her the present he had brought for her she clasped her hands together. Then she took the little cage between her two palms and kissed the bars of it, just as she had kissed her lover on the lips a moment before. It was a pretty picture, there in the last rays of the sunset, a scrub stone pine, growing from a piece of rock in the rampart, shivering above her in the wind of the desert, the hot, dry wind puffing up from the sou'-sou'-west, the wind that brings with it the flavour of the heart of Africa from those great spaces across which are written desolation--death. She held the little cage in her hands all the time they were together. It was their first time of being absolutely alone one with another. Several times when he tried to take her in his arms he found the little cage between himself and her. He could not injure the birds, so he released her. II One evening she came to meet him late for the rendezvous, and creeping through the darkness like a shadow. It was just before the new moon, and the stars had the sky all to themselves, a sky of black pansy-purple, luminous, leaping with life and light and fire. Up here, where they met, the murmur of the city came to them from below; the faint music of a band, louder or lower as the wind took it or left it, the murmur of the streets, shrill boy voices calling the last edition of the _Echo d'Oran_. She had brought bad news. Her father had discovered everything. It had all come about through the little birds. Someone must have seen her receiving them, and then, they were not a present that one could keep hidden for long. She kept them in her room, but their little soft voices chatting together must have reached the old man. Sounds like that were just the sounds to reach a person like Abraham Misas. He would have heard through walls of triple brass and by instinct. Then when she was out he would have poked his head into her room and seen the cage and its contents. He would then have cast about to find the giver. Or it may have been that someone just came into the shop and said to him, "I have seen your daughter with a soldier, one of the légionnaires." However that might be, the fact remained. Abraham Misas had a brother, a metal worker in Algiers, and on the day after the morrow he was going to Algiers and taking Manuella with him. She was to live with the brother and help him in his shop.