THE blinding June sky of Africa hung over the town. In the doorway of an Arab coffee-house a young man stood listening to the remarks exchanged by the patrons of the establishment, who lay in torpid heaps on the low shelf bordering the room.

The young man’s caftan was faded to a dingy brown, but the muslin garment covering it was clean, and so was the turban wound about his shabby fez.

Cleanliness was not the most marked characteristic of the conversation to which he lent a listless ear. It was no prurient curiosity that fixed his attention on this placid exchange of obscenities: he had lived too long in Morocco for obscenities not to have lost their savour. But he had never quite overcome the fascinated disgust with which he listened, nor the hope that one among the talkers would suddenly reveal some sense of a higher ideal, of what, at home, the earnest women he knew used solemnly to call a Purpose. He was sure that, some day, such a sign would come, and then —

Meanwhile, at that hour, there was nothing on earth to do in Eloued but to stand and listen —

The bazaar was beginning to fill up. Looking down the vaulted tunnel which led to the coffee-house the young man watched the thickening throng of shoppers and idlers. The fat merchant whose shop faced the end of the tunnel had just ridden up and rolled off his mule, while his black boy unbarred the door of the niche hung with embroidered slippers where the master throned. The young man in the faded caftan, watching the merchant scramble up and sink into his cushions, wondered for the thousandth time what he thought about all day in his dim stifling kennel, and what he did when he was away from it . . . for no length of residence in that dark land seemed to bring one nearer to finding out what the heathen thought and did when the eye of the Christian was off him.

Suddenly a wave of excitement ran through the crowd. Every head turned in the same direction, and even the camels bent their frowning faces and stretched their necks all one way, as animals do before a storm. A wild hoot had penetrated the bazaar, howling through the long white tunnels and under the reed-woven roofs like a Djinn among dishonoured graves. The heart of the young man began to beat.

“It sounds,” he thought, “like a motor . . . ”

But a motor at Eloued! There was one, every one knew, in the Sultan’s Palace. It had been brought there years ago by a foreign Ambassador, as a gift from his sovereign, and was variously reported to be made entirely of aluminium, platinum or silver. But the parts had never been put together, the body had long been used for breeding silk-worms in — a not wholly successful experiment — and the acetylene lamps adorned the Pasha’s gardens on state occasions. As for the horn, it had been sent as a gift, with a choice panoply of arms, to the Ca?d of the Red Mountain; but as the india-rubber bulb had accidentally been left behind, it was certainly not the Ca?d’s visit which the present discordant cries announced . . .

“Hullo, you old dromedary! How’s the folks up state?” cried a ringing voice. The awestruck populace gave way, and a young man in linen duster and motor cap, slipping under the interwoven necks of the astonished camels, strode down the tunnel with an air of authority and clapped a hand on the dreamer in the doorway.

“Harry Spink!” the latter gasped in a startled whisper, and with an intonation as un-African as his friend’s. At the same instant he glanced over his shoulder, and his mild lips formed a cautious: “‘sh.”

“Who’d you take me for — Gabby Deslys?” asked the newcomer gaily; then, seeing that this topical allusion hung fire: “And what the dickens are you ‘hushing’ for, anyhow? You don’t suppose, do you, that anybody in the bazaar thinks you’re a native? D’y’ ever look at your chin? Or that Adam’s apple running up and down you like a bead on a billiard marker’s wire? See here, Willard Bent . . . ”

The young man in the caftan blushed distressfully, not so much at the graphic reference to his looks as at the doubt cast on his disguise.

“I do assure you, Harry, I pick up a great deal of . . . of useful information . . . in this way . . . ”

“Oh, get out,” said Harry Spink cheerfully. “You believe all that still, do you? What’s the good of it all, anyway?”

Willard Bent passed a hand under the other’s arm and led him through the coffeehouse into an empty room at the back. They sat down on a shelf covered with matting and looked at each other earnestly.

“Don’t you believe any longer, Harry Spink?” asked Willard Bent.

“Don’t have to. I’m travelling for rubber now.”

“Oh, merciful heaven! Was that your automobile?”

“Sure.”

There was a long silence, during which

Bent sat with bowed head gazing on the earthen floor, while the bead in his throat performed its most active gymnastics. At last he lifted his eyes and fixed them on the tight red face of his companion.

“When did your faith fail you?” he asked............