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He wished again that he could have seen the girl before she had so successfully vanished from the face of the earth. At the same time he felt mixed emotions regarding the recent return of the third American to Bou Noura: he liked the man personally, but he hoped to avoid involvement in the affair, he wanted no part of it. Above all he prayed that the wife would not turn up in his territory, now that she was practically a cause celebre. There was the likelihood that she, too, would be ill, and the curiosity he felt to see her was outweighed by the dreaded prospect of complications in his work and reports to be made out. “Pourvu qu’ils la trouvent la-bas!” he thought ardently.
There was a knock at the gate. Ahmed swung it open. The American stood there; he came each day in the hope of getting news, and each day he looked more despondent at hearing that none had been received. “I knew the other one was having trouble with his wife, and this was the trouble,” said the lieutenant to himself when he glanced up and saw Tu
“Bonjour, monsieur,” he said jovially, advancing upon his guest. “Same news as always. But that can’t continue forever.”
Tu
His host called to Ahmed, and led the way into the house. They sat facing each other.
“Two weeks more and I shall be a married man again,” said the lieutenant, beaming at him, and thinking that perhaps he might yet show the Ouled Nail girls to an American.
“Very good, very good.” Tu
Ahmed brought in the bottle and the glasses. They drank for a moment in silence; then the lieutenant remarked, as much to break the silence as for any other reason: “Ah, yes. Life is amazing. Nothing ever happens the way one imagines it is going to. One realizes that most clearly here; all your philosophic systems crumble. At every turn one finds the unexpected. When your friend came here without his passport and accused poor Abdelkader, who ever would have thought that this short time later such a thing would have happened to him?” Then, thinking that his sequence of logic might be misinterpreted, he added: “Abdelkader was very sorry to hear of his death. He bore him no grudge, you know.”
Tu
“What?” said Tu
“But they were husband and wife,” pursued the lieutenant softly.
“Of course. Of course,” said Tu
“And even if they had not been, what difference?” He poured them each another drink, and seeing that his guest was disinclined to continue that conversation, he went on to another which might be less painful in its associations. Tu
Tu
Instead, he told himself, he would be practical, and the important thing now was to find Kit and get her back to New York. In the begi
He put his glass on the coffee table beside him. Giving voice to his thoughts, he said: “I’m going to stay here until Mrs. Moresby is found.” And he asked himself why he was being so stubborn about it, why Kit’s return obsessed him so utterly. Assuredly he was not in love with the poor girl. His overtures to her had been made out of pity (because she was a woman) and out of vanity (because he was a man), and the two feelings together had awakened the acquisitive desire of the trophy collector, nothing more. In fact, at this point, he realized that unless he thought carefully he was inclined to pass over the entire episode of intimacy between them, and to consider Kit purely in terms of their first meeting, when she and Port had impressed him so deeply as being the two people in the world he had wanted to know. It was less of a strain on his conscience that way; for more than once he had asked himself what had happened that crazy day at Sba when she had refused to open the door of the sick chamber, and whether or not she had told Port of her infidelity. Fervently he hoped not; he did not want to think of it.