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.

The red brick floor was heaving gently, Domini thought. She found
herself wondering how the cane chair by the small wardrobe kept its
footing, and why the cracked china basin in the iron washstand, painted