to the dawn of the second day following; and some
slight interval might then ensue, according as the general in command
ordained. But the twenty-four hours was all of which she could
be certain; and even of them some must have flown by since the
carrier-pigeon had been loosed to her. She could not tell how long he
had to live.

There were fifty miles between her and her goal; Abd-el-Kader's horse
had once covered that space in three hours, so men of the Army of
D'Aumale had told her; she knew what they had done she could do. Once
only she paused, to let her horse lie a brief while, and cool his
foam-flecked sides, and crop some short, sweet grass that grew where
a cleft of water ran and made the bare earth green. She sat quite
motionless while he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best
save his strength and further her travel; but she watched him during
those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of hunger in
her eyes--the worst hunger--that which craves Time and cannot seize it
fast enough. Then she mounted again, and again went on, on her flight.

She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, douairs of
peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, caravans of merchandise;
nothing arrested her; she saw nothing that she passed, as she rode over
the hard, dust-covered, shadowless roads; over the weary, sun-scorched,
monotonous country; over the land without verdure and without foliage,
the land that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination;
the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them in it, yet
return with as mad an infatuation as her lovers went back across the
waters to Circe.

The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood was coursing
from his flanks, as she reached her destination at last, and threw
herself off his saddle as he sank, faint and quivering, to the ground.
Whither she had come was to a fortress where the Marshal of France,
who was the Viceroy of Africa, had arrived that day in his progress
of inspection throughout the provinces. Soldiers clustered round
her eagerly beneath the gates and over the fallen beast; a thousand
questions pouring from their curious tongues. She pointed to the animal
with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled with cannon with
the other.

"Have a care of him; and lead me to the chief."

She spoke quietly; but a certain sensation of awe and fear moved those
who heard. She was not the C