“They are at your service, madame.”

“And their price?” She had been purchasing largely of the men on all sides as she swept down the length of the Chambre and she drew out some French banknotes as she spoke.  Never had the bitterness of poverty smitten him as it smote him now when this young patrician offered him her gold!  Old habits vanquished; he forgot who and where he now was; he bowed as in other days he had used to bow in the circle of St. James’.

“Is—­the honor of your acceptance, if you will deign to give that.”

He forgot that he was not as he once had been.  He forgot that he stood but as a private of the French army before an aristocrat whose name he had never heard.

She turned and looked at him, which she had never done before, so absorbed had she been in the chessmen, and so little did a Chasseur of the ranks pass into her thoughts.  There was an extreme of surprise, there was something of offense, and there was still more of coldness in her glance; a proud languid, astonished coldness of regard, though it softened slightly as she saw that he had spoken in all courtesy of intent.

She bent her graceful, regal head.

“I thank you.  Your very clever work can, of course, only be mine by purchase.”

And with that she laid aside the White King among his little troop of ivory Arabs and floated onward with her friends.  Cecil’s face paled slightly under the mellow tint left there by the desert sun and the desert wind; he swept the chessmen into their walnut case and thrust them out of sight under his knapsack.  Then he stood motionless as a sentinel, with the great leopard skins and Bedouin banners behind him, casting a gloom that the gold points on his harness could scarcely break in its heavy shadow, and never moved till the echo of the voices, and the cloud of draperies, and the fragrance of perfumed laces, and the brilliancy of the staff officers’ uniforms had passed away, and left the soldiers alone in their Chambre.  Those careless cold words from a woman’s lips had cut him deeper than the stick could have cut him, though it had bruised his loins and lashed his breast; they showed all he had lost.

“What a fool I am still!” he thought, as he made his way out of the barrack room.  “I might have fairly forgotten by this time that I ever had the rights of a gentleman.”

So the carvings had won him one warm heart and one keen pang that day; the vivandiere forgave, the aristocrat stung him, by means of those snowy, fragile, artistic toys that he had shaped in lonely nights under canvas by ruddy picket-fires, beneath the shade of wild fig trees, and in the stir and color of Bedouin encampments.