A week after the caravan of the Duc de Tremont left Algiers, Julia Redmond came unexpectedly to the villa of Madame de la Maine at an early morning hour. Madame de la Maine saw her standing on the threshold of her bedroom door. "_Chère_ Madame," Julia said, "I am leaving to-day with a dragoman and twenty servants to go into the desert." Madame de la Maine was still in bed. At nine o'clock she read her papers and her correspondence. "Into the desert--alone!" Julia, with her _cravache_ in her gloved hands, smiled sweetly though she was very pale. "I had not thought of going alone, Madame," she replied with charming assurance, "I knew you would go with me." On a chair by her bed was a wrapper of blue silk and lace. The comtesse sprang up and then thrust her feet into her slippers and stared at Julia. "What are you going to do in the desert?" "Watch!" "Yes, yes!" nodded Madame de la Maine. "And your aunt?" "Deep in a bazaar for the hospital," smiled Miss Redmond. Madame de la Maine regarded her slender friend with admiration and envy. "Why hadn't I thought of it?" She rang for her maid. "Because your great-grandfather was not a pioneer!" Miss Redmond answered. * * * * * * * The sun which, all day long, held the desert in its burning embrace, went westward in his own brilliant caravan. "The desert blossoms like a rose, Thérèse." "Like a rose?" questioned Madame de la Maine. She was sitting in the door of her tent; her white dress and her white hat gleamed like a touch of snow upon the desert's face. Julia Redmond, on a rug at her feet, and in her khaki riding-habit the color of the sand, blended with the desert as though part of it. She sat up as she spoke. "How divine! See!" She pointed to the stretches of the Sahara before her. On every side they spread away as far as the eye could reach, suave, mellow, black, undulating finally to small hillocks with corrugated sides, as a group of little sand-hills rose softly out of the sea-like plain. "Look, Thérèse!" Slowly, from ocher and gold the color changed; a faint wave-like blush crept over the sands, which reddened, paled, faded, warmed again, took depth and grew intense like flame. "The heart of a rose! _N'est-ce pas_, Thérèse?" "I understand now what you mean," said madame. The comtesse was not a dreamer. Parisian to the tips of her fingers, elegant, fine, she had lived a conventional life. Thérèse had been taught to conceal her emotions. She had been taught that our feelings matter very little to any one but ourselves. She had been taught to go lightly, to avoid serious things. Her great-grandmother had gone lightly to the scaffold, exquisitely courteous till the last. "I ask your pardon if I jostled you in the tumbrel," the old comtesse had said to her companion on the way to the guillotine. "The springs of the cart are poor"--and she went up smiling.