she was
capable of betraying everyone for Jacques.

Without the slightest uneasiness she had left him alone at Mustapha. He
was the only person she trusted--for a week. She meant to be back at
Mustapha within a week.

After their "Hush!" she and Mrs. Shiffney decided not to talk any more.

"It makes my throat ache shouting up against the roof," said Mrs.
Shiffney.

She had, how or why she scarcely knew, come to occupy an upper berth for
the first time in her life. She resented this. And she resented it still
more when Madame Sennier replied:

"I wanted you to choose the lower bed, but I thought you preferred being
where you are."

Mrs. Shiffney made no reply, but turned carefully over till she was
looking at the wall.

"Why do I do things for this woman?" was her thought. She had told
herself more than once that she was travelling to Constantine for
Henriette. Apparently she was actually beginning to believe her own
statement. She closed her eyes, opened them again, looked at the
ceiling, which almost touched her nose, and at the wall, which her nose
almost touched.

"Why does a woman ever do anything for another woman?" she asked
herself, amplifying her first thought.

Adelaide Shiffney in an upper berth! It was the incredible
accomplished!

CHAPTER XXII

"What a setting for melodrama!" said Mrs. Shiffney. She was standing on
the balcony of a corner room on the second floor of the Grand Hotel at
Constantine, looking down on the Place de la Breche. Evening was
beginning to fall. The city roared a tumultuous serenade to its delicate
beauty. The voices sent up from the dusty gardens, the squares, and the
winding alleys, from the teeming bazaars, the dancing-houses, the houses
of pleasure, and the painted Moorish cafes, seemed to grow more defiant
as the light grew colder on the great slopes of the mountains that
surround Constantine, as in the folds of the shallow valleys the
plantations of eucalyptus darkened beside the streams.

Madame Sennier was standing with Mrs. Shiffney and was also looking
down.

"Listen to all the voices!" she said. "Nobody but Jacques could ever get
this sort of effect into an opera."

A huge diligence, painted yellow, green, and red, with an immense hood
beneath which crowded Arabs vaguely showed, came slowly down the hill,
drawn by seven gray horses. The military Governor passed by on
horseback, preceded by a mounted soldier, and followed by two more
soldiers and