She waited for a long time. Over the face of the desert there seemed to be nothing but one veil of light. The silence grew so intense, so deep; the Arabs had stopped singing, but the heart fairly echoed, and Julia grew meditative--before her eyes the caravan she waited for seemed to come out of the moonlit mist, rocking, rocking--the camels and the huddled figures of the riders, their shadows cast upon the sand. And now Tremont would be forever changed in her mind. A man who had suffered from his youth, a warm-hearted boy, defrauded of his early love. It seemed to her that he was a charming figure to lead Sabron. "Thérèse," she murmured, "won't you tell me?" "They thought I had gone to bed," said the Comtesse de la Maine, "and I went back to my room by a little staircase, seldom used, and I found myself alone, and I knew what life was and what it meant to be poor." "But," interrupted Julia, horrified, "girls are not sold in the twentieth century." "They are sometimes in France, my dear. Robert was only seventeen. His father laughed at him, threatened to send him to South America. We were victims." "It was the harvest moon," continued Madame de la Maine gently, "and it shone on us every night until my wedding-day. Then the duke kept his threat and sent Robert out of France. He continued his studies in England and went into the army of Africa." There was a silence again. "I did not see him until last year," said Madame de la Maine, "after my husband died." CHAPTER XXIV THE MEETING Under the sun, under the starry nights Tremont, with his burden, journeyed toward the north. The halts were distasteful to him, and although he was forced to rest he would rather have been cursed with sleeplessness and have journeyed on and on. He rode his camel like a Bedouin; he grew brown like the Bedouins and under the hot breezes, swaying on his desert ship, he sank into dreamy, moody and melancholy reveries, like the wandering men of the Sahara, and felt himself part of the desolation, as they were. "What will be, will be!" Hammet Abou said to him a hundred times, and Tremont wondered: "Will Charles live to see Algiers?" Sabron journeyed in a litter carried between six mules, and they traveled slowly, slowly. Tremont rode by the sick man's side day after day. Not once did the soldier for any length of time regain his reason. He would pass from coma to delirium, and many times Tremont thought he had ceased to breathe. Slender, emaciated under his covers, Sabron lay like the image of a soldier in wax--a wounded man carried as a votive offering to the altars of desert warfare.