Millie listened and looked. Wonder grew upon her. It was for her that he had laboured and endured and succeeded! His story was a revelation to her. Never had she dreamed that a man would so strive for any woman. She had lived so long among the little things of the world--the little emotions, the little passions, the little jealousies and rivalries, the little aims, the little methods of attaining them, that only with great difficulty could she realise a simpler and a wider life. She was overwhelmed now. Pride and humiliation fought within her--pride that Tony had so striven for her in silence and obscurity, humiliation because she had fallen so short of his example. It was her way to feel in superlatives at any crisis of her destiny, but surely she had a justification now. "I never knew--I never thought! Oh, Tony!" she exclaimed, twisting her hands together as she sat before him. "I became a sergeant," he said. "Then I brought back the remnants of the geographical expedition to Ouargla." He taxed his memory for the vivid details of that terrible retreat. He compelled her to realise something of the dumb, implacable hostility of the Sahara, to see, in the evening against the setting sun, the mounted figures of the Touaregs, and to understand that the day's march had not shaken them off. She seemed to be on the march herself, wondering whether she would live out the day, or, if she survived that, whether she would live out the night. "But you succeeded!" she cried, clinging to the fact that they were both here in France, with the murmur of the Mediterranean in their ears. "You came back." "Yes, I came back. One morning I marched my men through the gate of Ouargla--and what were you doing upon that day?" Talking, perhaps, with Lionel Callon, in one of those unfrequented public places with which London abounds! Millie could not tell. She sat there and compared Lionel Callon with the man who was before her. Memories of the kind of talk she was wont to hold with Lionel Callon recurred to her, filling her with shame. She was glad to think that when Tony led his broken, weary force through the gate of Ouargla Lionel Callon had not been with her--had indeed been far away in Chili. She suddenly placed her hands before her face and burst into tears. "Oh, Tony," she whispered, in an abasement of humiliation. "Oh, Tony." "By that homeward march," he went on, "I gained my commission. That was what I aimed at all the while, and I had earned it at the last. Look!" He took from his pocket the letter which his colonel had handed to him at Ain-Sefra. He had carefully treasured it all this while. He held it out to her and made her read.