Raboustel was delighted. He could not express his thanks. Five francs was an impossible sum for him just then, and if he had possessed it he could not have spent it on a prettier present than the birds.
Manuella was not the girl to appreciate cheap jewellery.
That evening he was to meet her on the ramparts, and at sunset there he was true to time, and he had scarcely been waiting five minutes when she appeared, dressed as he had never seen her before, with a lace mantilla covering her shapely head.
It was a lonely spot that they had chosen, giving a view over the country towards the west.
When he took the covering off the cage and showed her the present he had brought for her she clasped her hands together.
Then she took the little cage between her two palms and kissed the bars of it, just as she had kissed her lover on the lips a moment before.
It was a pretty picture, there in the last rays of the sunset, a scrub stone pine, growing from a piece of rock in the rampart, shivering above her in the wind of the desert, the hot, dry wind puffing up from the sou'-sou'-west, the wind that brings with it the flavour of the heart of Africa from those great spaces across which are written desolation—death.
She held the little cage in her hands all the time they were together. It was their first time of being absolutely alone one with another. Several times when he tried to take her in his arms he found the little cage between himself and her. He could not injure the birds, so he released her.
II
One evening she came to meet him late for the rendezvous, and creeping through the darkness like a shadow.