that some English captain was going to marry her, and then I read in the Paris Herald that she was settled in the American colony there, and one day it gave a list of the people who’d been to a reception she gave.  She could go where she pleased, and she had money in her own right, you know; and she was being revenged on me every day.  And I was here knowing it, and loving her worse than I ever loved anything on earth, and having lost the right to tell her so, and not able to go to her.  Then one day some chap turned up from here and told her about me, and about how miserable I was, and how well I was being punished.  He thought it would please her, I suppose.  I don’t know who he was, but I guess he was in love with her himself.  And then the papers had it that I was down with the fever here, and she read about it.  I was ill for a time, and I hoped it was going to carry me off decently, but I got up in a week or two, and one day I crawled down here where we’re standing now to watch the boat come in.  I was pretty weak from my illness, and I was bluer than I had ever been, and I didn’t see anything but blackness and bitterness for me anywhere.  I turned around when the passengers reached the pier, and I saw a woman coming up those stairs.  Her figure and her shoulders were so like Alice’s that my heart went right up into my throat, and I couldn’t breathe for it.  I just stood still staring, and when she reached the top of the steps she looked up, breathing with the climb, and laughing; and she says, ‘Lloyd, I’ve come to see you.’  And I—­I was that lonely and weak that I grabbed her hand, and leaned back against the railing, and cried there before the whole of them.  I don’t think she expected it exactly, because she didn’t know what to do, and just patted me on the shoulder, and said, ’I thought I’d run down to cheer you up a bit; and I’ve brought Mrs. Scott with me to chaperon us.’  And I said, without stopping to think:  ’You wouldn’t have needed any chaperon, Alice, if I hadn’t been a cur and a fool.  If I had only asked what I can’t ask of you now’; and, Holcombe, she flushed just like a little girl, and laughed, and said, ‘Oh, will you, Lloyd?’ And you see that ugly iron chapel up there, with the corrugated zinc roof and the wooden cross on it, next to the mosque?  Well, that’s where we went first, right from this wharf before I let her go to a hotel, and old Ridley, the English rector, he married us, and we had a civil marriage too.  That’s what she did for me.  She had the whole wide globe to live in, and she gave it up to come to Tangier, because I had no other place but Tangier, and she’s made my life for me, and I’m happier here than I ever was before anywhere, and sometimes I think—­I hope—­that she is, too.”  Carroll’s lips moved slightly, and his hands trembled on the rail.  He coughed, and his voice was gentler when he spoke again.  “And so,” he added, “that’s why I felt it last night when you refused to meet her.  You were right, I know, from your way of thinking, but we’ve grown careless down here, and we look at things differently.”