This thought reminded her of her plan. Not that she ever forgot it; but she had to put it into the background of her mind until she was sure that Max was going to get well. Until then, she could not and would not leave him. But at last she was sure; and she was waiting only to find out if her father could help; or if not, till his leave was over and she was left to act for herself without compromising the Legion's colonel.
If Sanda had loved her father in their days together at Bel-Abbés, she loved him a thousand times more in those few days of his visit at Cairo. He forgave her without being asked for leaving him "in the lurch," as she repentantly called it, and letting herself be carried away by Stanton. "You thought you loved him, my darling," DeLisle said. "And I could forgive anything to love."
It was in his arms, with her face buried on his breast, that she told what her marriage had been, and then came the confession (for it seemed to her a confession, though she was not ashamed of it, but proud) about Max.
"He didn't speak one word of love to me," the girl said. "He tried not even to let his eyes speak. But they did, sometimes, in spite of him. And no man could possibly endure or do for a woman the things he endured and did for me, every one of those terrible days, if he didn't love her. So when I was afraid he might die from the viper's bite, I wanted him to have one happy moment in this world to remember in the next. I told him that I cared, and he kissed my hand and looked at me. That's all, except just a word or two that I keep too sacredly to tell even you. And afterward when Richard was dead, and Max and I were alone in the desert, save for a few Arabs, he never again referred to that night, or spoke of our love. I was sure it was only because we were alone and I depended on him. But after those weeks and months of facing death together, it seems that we belong to each other, he and I. Nothing must part us—nothing."
She was half afraid her father might remind her of the situation which had arisen between Max as a deserter and himself as colonel of the regiment from which Max had deserted.
But Colonel DeLisle did not say this or anything like it. He knew that love was the greatest thing in the world for his daughter, as it had been for him, and he could not cheat her out of it. He was sad because it seemed to him that in honour he could do nothing for this deserter who had done everything for him—nothing, that is, save give him his daughter, and abandon what remained of his own career by resigning his commission. As colonel of the Legion, his child could not be allowed to marry a deserter, a fugitive who dare not enter France. As for him, DeLisle, though the Legion was much to him, Sanda was more. But she said she and Max would not take happiness at that price. They must think of some other way. And the other way was the plan.
When the colonel returned to Algeria and his regiment Max had not yet gained enough strength to be seen and thanked for what he had done, even if DeLisle had found it compatible with his official duty to say to a deserter what was in his heart to say to Sanda's hero. And perhaps, Sanda thought, it was as well that they did not meet just then. Irrevocable things might have been spoken between them.
The day after her father's ship sailed for Algiers she took another that went from Port Said to Marseilles. From Marseilles she travelled to Paris, which was familiar ground to her. What she did there gave a new fillip to the Stanton-DeLisle-St. George sensation, though at the same time it put an extinguisher on all discussions: a blow to those retired officers who liked writing to the papers.
Lest what the papers said should be prematurely seen by the convalescent's eyes, however, Sanda hurried back to Egypt.