Page:Christopher Wren--the wages of virtue.djvu/285

Rh to the experienced Russian girl, the wildness of the Neapolitan revenge-passion was an alarming revelation.

"Though I starve or go mad, I cannot eat nor sleep till I have spat on his dead face," were the only words she answered to Olga's entreaty that she would take food. But she busied herself about her daily tasks with pinched white face, pinched white lips, and cavernous black brooding eyes.

"Rivoli's next meal here will be his last," thought Olga Kyrilovitch, and shuddered.

Terrible and unfathomable as was Carmelita's agony of mind, she insisted on carrying out the programme for the escape of the two Russians fixed for that day, and Olga salved a feeling of selfishness by assuring herself that anything which took the girl's thoughts from her own tragedy was for her good.

That afternoon, Feodor Kyrilovitch made his unobtrusive exit from the Legion and was admitted by his sister at the back door of the Café. In his pocket was a letter enclosed in a blank envelope. On an inner envelope was the following name and address: "Lady Huntingten, Elham Old Hall, Elham, Kent, England."

By the five-thirty train two flighty females--one blonde, the other brunette--were seen off from the little Sidi-bel-Abbès station of the Western Algerian Railway, which runs from Tlemcen to Oran, by Mademoiselle Carmelita of the Café de la Légion. Their conversation and playful badinage with the guard of Légionnaires, which is always on duty at the platform gate, were frivolous and unedifying. Sergeant Boulanger, as gallant to women as he was