“Her as was in the Biscay, July come two years?  Her as drove through the storm like a mad thing, and flew like a swallow, when everything was splitting and foundering, and shipping seas around her?  Her as was the first to bear down to the great ‘Wrestler,’ a-lying there hull over in water, and took aboard all as ever she could hold o’ the passengers; a-pitching out her own beautiful cabin fittings to have as much room for the poor wretches as ever she could?  Be you a-meaning her?”

Cecil nodded assent.

“She was my yacht, that’s all; and I was without a captain through that storm.  Will you think me a good enough sailor now?”

The skipper wrung his hand till he nearly wrung it off.

“Good enough!  Blast my timbers!  There aren’t one will beat you in any waters.  Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes it; but never a stroke of work shall you do atween my decks.  I never did think as how one of your yachting-nobs could ever be fit to lay hold of a tiller; but, hang me, if the Club make such sailors as you it’s a rare ’un!  Lord a mercy!  Why, my wife was in the ‘Wrestler.’  I’ve heard her tell scores of times as how she was almost dead when that little yacht came through a swaling sea, that was all heaving and roaring round the wreck, and as how the swell what owned it gave his cabin up to the womenkind, and had his swivel guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he might be able to carry more passengers, and fed ’em, and gave ’em champagne all around, and treated ’em like a prince, till he ran ’em straight into Brest Harbor.  But, damn me! that ever a swell like you should—­”

“Let’s weigh anchor,” said Bertie quietly.

And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through Europe the tidings went that the mutilated form, crushed between iron and wood, on the Marseilles line, was his, and that he had perished in that awful, ink-black, sultry southern night, when the rushing trains had met, as meet the thunder-clouds.  The world thought him dead; as such the journals recorded him, with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, to make the death the darker; as such his name was forbidden to be uttered at Royallieu; as such the Seraph mourned him with passionate, loving force, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt:—­and he, leaving them in their error, was drafted into the French army under two of his Christian names, which happily had a foreign sound—­Louis Victor—­and laid aside forever his identity as Bertie Cecil.

He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely come in any of the larger towns since he had joined.  His only danger of recognition, had been once when a Marshal of France, whom he had used to know well in Paris and at the court of St. James, held an inspection of the African troops.

Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few yards’ distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, had glanced involuntarily at the face that he had seen oftentimes in the Salles de Marechaux, and even under the roof of the regiment, ready to note a chain loose, a belt awry, a sword specked with rust, if such a sin there were against “les ordonnances” in all the glittering squadrons; and swept over him, seeing in him but one among thousands—­a unit in the mighty aggregate of the “raw material” of war.