Madame de la Maine pressed Julia's hand.
"When it was decided between my grandmother and the comte, I escaped at night, after they thought I had gone to bed, and I went down to the lower terrace where the weeds grew in plenty, and told Robert. Somehow, I did not expect him to make fun, although we always joked about everything until this night. It was after nine o'clock."
The comtesse swept one hand toward the desert. "A moon like this—only not like this—ma chère. There was never but that moon to me for many years.
"I thought at first that Bob would kill me,—he grew so white and terrible. He seemed suddenly to have aged ten years. I will never forget his cry as it rang out in the night. 'You will marry that old man when we love each other?' I had never known it until then.
"We were only children, but he grew suddenly old. I knew it then," said Madame de la Maine intensely, "I knew it then."
She waited for a long time. Over the face of the desert there seemed to be nothing but one veil of light. The silence grew so intense, so deep; the Arabs had stopped singing, but the heart fairly echoed, and Julia grew meditative—before her eyes the caravan she waited for seemed to come out of the moonlit mist, rocking, rocking—the camels and the huddled figures of the riders, their shadows cast upon the sand.
And now Tremont would be forever changed in her mind. A man who had suffered from his youth, a warm-hearted boy, defrauded of his early love. It seemed to her that he was a charming figure to lead Sabron.
"Thérèse," she murmured, "won't you tell me?"
"They thought I had gone to bed," said the Comtesse de la Maine, "and I went back to my room by a little staircase, seldom used, and I found myself alone, and I knew what life was and what it meant to be poor."
"But," interrupted Julia, horrified, "girls are not sold in the twentieth century."