THE MAD MUSIC
Max was struck dumb by the shock. He had expected nothing so devastating as this. What to do he knew not, yet something he must do. If he had not loved the girl, it would have been easier. There would have been no fear then that he might think of himself and not of her. Yet she had been put under his charge by Colonel DeLisle. He was responsible for her welfare and her safety. Ought he to constitute himself her guardian and stand between her and this man? On the other hand, could he attempt playing out a farce of guardianship—he, almost a stranger, and a boy compared to Stanton, who had been, according to Sanda, informally her guardian when she was a little girl? Max stammered a few words, not knowing what he said, or whether he were speaking sense, but Stanton paid him the compliment of treating him like a reasonable man. Suddenly Max became conscious that the explorer was deliberately focussing upon him all the intense magnetism which had won adherents to the wildest schemes.
"I understand exactly what you are thinking about me," Stanton said. "You must feel I am mad or a brute to want this child to go with me across the desert, to share the fate all Europe is prophesying."
"It's glory to share it," broke in Sanda, in a voice like a harp. "Do I care what happens to me if I can be with you?"
Stanton laughed a delightful laugh.
"She is a child—an infatuated child! But shouldn't I be more—or less—than a man, if I could let such a stroke of luck pass by me? You see, she wants to go."
"He knows I love you, and have loved you all my life," said Sanda. "I told him in Algiers when I was so miserable, thinking that I should never see you again, and that you didn't care."
"Of course I cared," Stanton contradicted her warmly; yet there was a difference in his tone. To Max's ears, it did not ring true. "Seeing a grown-up Sanda, when I'd always kept in my mind's eye a little girl, bowled me over. I made excuses to get away in a hurry, didn't I? It was the bravest thing I ever did. I knew I wasn't a marble statue. But it was another thing keeping my head in broad daylight on the terrace of a hotel, with a lot of dressed-up creatures coming and going, from what it is here in the desert at night, with that mad music playing me away into the unknown, and a girl like Sanda flashing down like a falling star."
"The star fell into your arms, and you saved it from extinction," she finished for him, laughing a little gurgling laugh of ecstasy.
"I caught it on its way somewhere else! But how can I let it go when it wants to shine for me? How can I be expected to let it go? I ask you that, St. George!"