She was deceitful and mendacious, little Fatou, with an incredible blend of malice and perversity; Jean had known this for a long time. But he was aware, too, of her absolute devotion to him, the devotion of a dog to its master, of a negro to his fetish, and without positively knowing to what height of heroism this sentiment might raise her, he was touched and softened by it. Sometimes his intense pride was roused, and his white man’s dignity rose in revolt. The faith he had plighted to his betrothed, and had betrayed for the sake of a little black girl, accused him to his honest conscience. He was ashamed of his weakness. But Fatou-gaye had grown very handsome. When she walked with her lithe, well-moulded figure swaying from the hips with that grace of movement which the African women seem to have borrowed from the great felidæ of their country; when she passed by, with her drapery of white muslin floating like a peplum over her bosom and rounded shoulders, she had the perfection of an antique statue. When she lay asleep with her arms above her head, she displayed the curves of an amphora. Under that high headdress of amber her delicate face, with its regular features, had at times something of the beauty of an idol of polished ebony; her great, half-closed, lustrous, blue-black eyes, her dusky smile, slowly revealing her white teeth, all this had a negroid fascination, a sensual charm, a power of material seduction, an indefinable something which seemed to savour simultaneously of the monkey, the young virgin, and the tigress—and all this would race through the spahi’s veins with a strange intoxication. Jean had a kind of superstitious horror of all these amulets; at length there were moments when this profusion of _grigris_ vexed and oppressed him. He had no faith in them, to be sure, but to see them everywhere, these negro amulets, to know that nearly all of them possessed the supposed virtue of holding and enmeshing him; to see them hanging from his ceiling and on his walls; to find them hidden under his mats and under his tara—charms everywhere, little objects, old and witchlike, with a malevolent air about them, and weird in shape—to wake up in the morning and feel them being stealthily slipped on to his breast—it seemed to him that in the end all this would weave in the air around him invisible, shadowy shackles. And then he was short of money. He said to himself very firmly that he would send Fatou away. He would make use of these last two years to win at last his gold stripes; he would send his old parents a small monthly remittance to make their life more comfortable; and he could still save sufficient money to bring back wedding presents to Jeanne Méry, and to make a respectable contribution towards the expenses of their marriage feast.