he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt hands down the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with the air of a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world.  By this time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in line along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towards Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts, its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them the whole of France.  The bronchial hoot of the siren rose up menacingly.  Suddenly two Arabs, in dirty white burnouses and turbans bound with cords of camel’s hair, came running along the wharf.  The siren hooted again.  The Arabs bounded over the gangway with grave faces.  All the recruits turned to examine them with a mixture of superiority and deference, such as a schoolboy might display when observing the agilities of a tiger.  The ropes fell heavily from the posts of the quay into the water, and were drawn up dripping by the sailors, and Le General Bertrand began to move out slowly among the motionless ships.

Domini, looking towards the land with the vague and yet inquiring glance of those who are going out to sea, noticed the church of Notre dame de la Garde, perched on its high hill, and dominating the noisy city, the harbour, the cold, grey squadrons of the rocks and Monte Cristo’s dungeon.  At the time she hardly knew it, but now, as she lay in bed in the silent inn, she remembered that, keeping her eyes upon the church, she had murmured a confused prayer to the Blessed Virgin for the recruits.  What was the prayer?  She could scarcely recall it.  A woman’s petition, perhaps, against the temptations that beset men shifting for themselves in far-off and dangerous countries; a woman’s cry to a woman to watch over all those who wander.

When the land faded, and the white sea rose, less romantic considerations took possession of her.  She wished to sleep, and drank a dose of a drug.  It did not act completely, but only numbed her senses.  Through the long hours she lay in the dark cabin, looking at the faint radiance that penetrated through the glass shutters of the skylight.  The recruits, humanised and drawn together by misery, were becoming acquainted.  The incessant murmur of their voices dropped down to her, with the sound of the waves, and of the mysterious cries and creaking shudders that go through labouring ships.  And all these noises seemed to her hoarse and pathetic, suggestive, too, of danger.

When they reached the African shore, and saw the lights of houses twinkling upon the hills, the pale recruits were marshalled on the white road by Zouaves, who met them from the barracks of Robertville.  Already they looked older than they had looked when they embarked.  Domini saw them march away up the hill.  They still clung to their bags and bundles.  Some of them, lifting shaky voices, tried to sing in chorus.  One of the Zouaves angrily shouted to them to be quiet.  They obeyed, and disappeared heavily into the shadows, staring about them anxiously at the feathery palms that clustered in this new and dark country, and at the shrouded figures of Arabs who met them on the way.