It was just before the new moon, and the stars had the sky all to themselves, a sky of black pansy-purple, luminous, leaping with life and light and fire.
Up here, where they met, the murmur of the city came to them from below; the faint music of a band, louder or lower as the wind took it or left it, the murmur of the streets, shrill boy voices calling the last edition of the Echo d'Oran.
She had brought bad news.
Her father had discovered everything. It had all come about through the little birds. Someone must have seen her receiving them, and then, they were not a present that one could keep hidden for long.
She kept them in her room, but their little soft voices chatting together must have reached the old man. Sounds like that were just the sounds to reach a person like Abraham Misas. He would have heard through walls of triple brass and by instinct. Then when she was out he would have poked his head into her room and seen the cage and its contents. He would then have cast about to find the giver.
Or it may have been that someone just came into the shop and said to him, "I have seen your daughter with a soldier, one of the légionnaires."
However that might be, the fact remained. Abraham Misas had a brother, a metal worker in Algiers, and on the day after the morrow he was going to Algiers and taking Manuella with him. She was to live with the brother and help him in his shop.
Abraham had said not one word to his daughter of the reason for the change, he had made no reproach. That was the sort of man he was, secretive, silent, always working underground to obtain his ends and always obtaining them.
To a callous outsider this decision of the old man, taking all the facts into consideration, was a piece of profound common sense. For even had Raboustel been an eligible party he was tied to the Legion for nearly five years more.
Had Raboustel been worth a million of money he could not have escaped the Legion's clutches. No man once seized by that iron grip can ever escape, be he prince or millionaire or pauper, till the expiration of his term of service sets him free.