Millionaire
Houston's" perhaps--was the ring Max had given her the night when the
telegram came. The photograph, which was large and clearly reproduced,
showed the curiously shaped stone on the middle finger of Billie's left
hand. A large round pearl adorned the finger on which Max had once hoped
she might wear the blue diamond, a pearl so conspicuous that the original
of the picture appeared to display it purposely. "Millionaire Houston"
would be flattered; and that was what Billie Brookton wanted. As for what
Max Doran might think if he saw the portrait, why should she care? For
her, he was numbered with the dead.

Max was no longer in love with Billie. The shock of Rose Doran's
terrible accident, the story she had to tell, and her death, had chilled
the fire of what he thought was love. The letter of farewell had put it
out. But the scar of the burn sometimes hurts. To-night was one of those
times; and Max believed that his disappointment in Billie had had its
influence in driving him to the Legion. She stood now as a type of what
was mercenary, calculating, and false in womankind, just as (almost
unknown to himself) Sanda DeLisle stood for what was gentle, yet brave
and true. He felt that Billie Brookton had made him hard, with a
hardness that was not good; and that not only she, but all those he had
cared for most in his old life, had deceived and tricked or at best
forgotten him. Lying in his narrow bunk, Max lifted his head and let
his eyes wander over the faces of his comrades, turned to gray stone by
the moonlight. Not one which was not sad, except that of the Alsatian
who had joined on the day of his own recruitment. The boy was smiling in
some dream and looked like a child, but a sickly child, for the heat and
the severe marching drill for _les bleus_ were telling upon him. Faces
of twenty different types, faces which by day masked their secrets with
sullenness, defiance, or stolidity, could hide nothing in sleep, but
fell into lines of sadness that gave a strange family resemblance to the
stone soldiers on the tombs. Saddest of all, after Manoeel Valdez,
perhaps, was the wrecked visage of Pelle, whose own particular _cafard_
had been leading him a merry dance the last few days.

To Sidi-bel-Abbes, with a letter of introduction to the colonel, had
come an old officer of the British army, a man of distinction. Pelle, as
an Englishman and an ex-soldier, had been honoured by being appointed
his guide. The two h