“She turned, and looked right at me. ‘That my fate lies in the sand,’ she said—‘and yours, and hers.’ “And she pointed at little Marie, who was playing with a yellow kid we had then just by the door. “‘What’s that to be afraid of?’ I asked her. ‘Haven’t we come to the desert to make our fortune, and isn’t there sand in the desert?’ “‘Not much by here,’ she said. “And that’s true, m’sieu. It’s hard ground, you know, at Beni-Mora.” “Yes,” I said, offering him another cigar. He refused it with a quick gesture. “She never would say another word as to what the sand-diviner had told her; but she was never the same from that day. She was as uneasy as a lost bitch, m’sieu; and she made me uneasy too. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak to our little one when the child ran to her, and sometimes she’d catch her up, and kiss her till the little one’s cheek was as red as if you’d been striking it. And then one day, after dark, she went.” “Went!” “I’d been ill with fever, and gone to spend the night at the sulphur baths; you know, m’sieu, Hammam-Salahkin, under the mountains. I came back just at dawn to open the café. When I got off my mule at the door I heard”—his face twitched convulsively—“the most horrible crying of a child. It was so horrible that I just stood there, holding on to the bridle of the mule, and listening, and didn’t dare go in. I’d heard children cry often enough before; but—_mon Dieu!_—never like that. At last I dropped the bridle, and went in, with my legs shaking under me. I found the little one alone in the house, and like a mad thing. She’d been alone all night.” His face set rigidly. “And her mother knew I should be all night at the Hammam,” he said. “Fin Tireur—yes, it was coming back, and finding my little one left like that in such a place, made me earn the name.” He fell suddenly into a moody silence. I broke it by saying: “It was the sand-diviner?” He looked at me sharply. “I don’t know.” “You never found out?” “At Beni-Mora the women go veiled,” he said harshly. Suddenly I realised the horror of the situation: the deserted husband living on with his child in the midst of the ordained and close secrecy of Beni-Mora, where many of the women never set foot out of doors, and those who do, unless they are the public dancers, are so heavily veiled that their features cannot be recognised. “What did you do?” I asked. “I searched, as far as one can search in an Arab town, and found out nothing. I wanted to tear the veil from every woman in the place; and then I was sent away from Beni-Mora.” “By whom?” “The French authorities, my own countrymen,” he laughed bitterly. “To save me from getting myself murdered, m’sieu.” “You would have been.” “Why not? Then I came here to keep the inn for the diligence that carries the mails to the south, for I wouldn’t leave the country till⸺” He paused. “And the sand-diviner?”