How often had this room in the remote hill town of Mulai Idris been suddenly filled with the fragrance of a Sussex garden, whilst he himself looked out not upon the hillside of Zahoun but upon a dim and dewy lawn where roses clustered! He had done the bad thing which his father did, and, like his father, lost his place in the world. Could he now win back that place by the expiation of his father’s friend? Was it not of excellent omen that the solution which he had remembered, Marguerite had herself devised? But she must weigh everything.
“It may be long before opportunity comes,” he warned her. “Such opportunity as will restore to me my name. It may never come at all. Or death may come with it.”
Marguerite looked round the room and out of the window to the barren hill.
“Is not this death, Paul?” she answered, simply, and he was answered.
“You must make me a promise, too, before I go, Marguerite,” he continued. “More than once you’ve said you couldn’t go on living if . . .”
A great load was lifted from both of them. They set straightway about their preparations. Marguerite was to set out first with Selim and her women. The road over the Red Hill to Tangier was no longer safe at all, since it passed through a portion of the Spanish zone. But five days of easy travel would take her to Casablanca, through a country now peaceful as a road in France. She would go to Marseilles, she said, and wait there for news of Paul. They passed that evening with a lightness of spirit which neither of them had known since they had laughed and loved in the house of Si Ahmed Driss before the massacres of Fez.
“There is one thing which troubles me,” said Paul, catching her in his arms and speaking with a great tenderness. “Long ago in Fez you once told me of a girl who, when her husband died, dressed herself in her wedding gown——”
“Hush!” said Marguerite, and laid her hand upon his lips.
“You remember, then?” said Paul. He took her hand gently away, and Marguerite bent her head down and nodded. “‘I couldn’t do that, my dear,’ you said. I have never forgotten it, Marguerite. I should have dearly loved, if before we parted—that had been possible.”
Marguerite raised her face. There were tears in her eyes, but her lips were smiling, and there was a smile, too, in her eyes behind the tears.
