"I agree so far. Still, let's keep Ben Halim's secret to ourselves. We must have it to play with. I believe Sabine's a man to trust; but he's a French officer; and a plot of that sort he might feel it his duty to make known."
"All right. We'll keep back that part of the business. It isn't necessary to give it away. But otherwise Sabine's the man for us. He's a romantic sort of chap, not unlike me in that; it's what appealed to me in him the minute we began to draw each other out. He'll snap at an adventure to help a pretty girl even though he's never seen her; and he knows the marabout's boy and the guardian-uncle. He was talking to me about them this afternoon. Let's go and rout him out. I bet he'll have a plan to propose."
"Rather cheek, to rouse him up in the middle of the night. We might wait till morning, since I don't see that we can do anything useful before."
"He only got in from seeing some friend in barracks, about one. He doesn't look like a sleepy-head. Besides, if I'm not mistaken, I smell his cigarettes. He's probably lying on his bed, reading a novel."
But Sabine was reading something to him far more interesting than any novel written by the greatest genius of all ages; a collection of Saidee's letters, which he invariably read through, from first to last, every night before even trying to sleep.
The chance to be in the game of rescue was new life to him. He grudged Saidee's handwriting to another man, even though he felt that, somehow, she had hoped that he would see it, and that he would work with the others. He laughed at the idea that the adventure would be more dangerous for him as a French officer, if anything leaked out, than for two travelling Englishmen.
"I would give my soul to be in this!" he exclaimed, before he knew what he was saying, or what meaning might be read into his words. But both faces spoke surprise. He was abashed, yet eager. The impulse of his excitement led him on, and he began stammering out the story he had not meant to tell.
"I can't say the things you ought to know, without the things that no one ought to know," he explained in his halting English, plunging back now and then inadvertently into fluent French. "It is wrong not to confess that all the time I know that young lady is there—in the Zaouïa. But there is a reason I feel it not right to confess. Now it will be different because of this letter that has come. You must hear all and you can judge me."
So the story was poured out: the romance of that wonderful day when, while he worked at the desert well in the hot sun, a lady went by, with her servants, to the Moorish baths. How her veil had fallen aside, and he had seen her face—oh, but the face of a houri, an angel. Yet so sad—tragedy in the beautiful eyes. In all his life he had not seen such beauty or felt his heart so stirred. Through an attendant at the baths he had found out that the lovely lady was the wife of the marabout, a Roumia, said not to be happy. From that moment he would have sacrificed his hopes of heaven to set her free. He had written—he had laid his life at her feet. She had answered. He had written again. Then the sister had arrived. He had been told in a letter of her coming. At first he had thought it impossible to confide a secret concerning another—that other a woman—even to her sister's friends. But now there was no other way. They must all work together. Some day he hoped that the dear prisoner would be free to give herself to him as his wife. Till then, she was sacred, even in his thoughts. Even her sister could find no fault with his love. And would the new friends shake his hand wishing him joy in future.
So all three shook hands with great heartiness; and perhaps Sabine would have become still more expansive had he not been brought up to credit Englishmen stolid fellows at best with a favourite motto: "Deeds, not words."