"Then will you go?"
"No! I told you nothing could make me leave you till—after it's over. What would be the use anyhow, even if I would go? If they're going to call me a deserter, I'm that already."
"Ah!" she hid her face in her hands, shivering with sobs. "I've made you a deserter. I've ruined you! Your career my father hoped for! If he were at Bel-Abbés he'd save you. But he's far away in the desert." The girl lifted her face and brushed away the tears. "Soldier, if you don't go now, don't go at all! Don't offer yourself up to punishment for what is not your fault, but mine, the fault of your colonel's daughter. Stay with me—stay with us! Keep the trust my father gave you, watching over me. Will you do that? Will you, instead of going back straight to prison and spoiling your life? Join us and help us to find the Lost Oasis."
The young man's blood rushed to his head. He could not speak. He could only look at her.
"You say that already you've made yourself a deserter," she went on. "Then desert to us, I wanted you to join the Legion, and you did join; so I've called you 'my soldier.' Now I want you not to go back to the Legion. It would be a horrible injustice for you to be punished as you would be. I couldn't be happy even with Richard, thinking of you in prison."
"The world is a prison, if it comes to that!" laughed Max.
"For some people. Not for a man like you! Besides, some of the cells in the world's prison are so much more terrible than others. Come with us, and by and by, if we live, we shall reach Egypt. There you'll be free, as Manöel Valdez will be free outside Algeria and France."
"My colonel's daughter asks me to do this?" Max muttered, half under his breath.
"Yes, because I am his daughter as well as your friend. Do you think he'd like you to go back to Sidi-bel-Abbés under a cloud, with him far away, not able to speak for you? I know as well as if you'd told me that, if they tried you by court-martial at Oran, you wouldn't defend yourself as you would if my father had ordered you to give up the march, instead of asking you to go on a private errand for him with your friend. Because he did an irregular thing and trouble has come of it, don't I know you'd suffer rather than let details be dragged from you which might injure my father's record as an officer?"
"His record is far above being injured."