“I must ask to be ordered out of the city,” he thought, as he pushed his way through the crowds of soldiers and civilians.  “Here I get bitter, restless, impatient; here the past is always touching me on the shoulder; here I shall soon grow to regret, and to chafe, and to look back like any pining woman.  Out yonder there, with no cares to think of but my horse and my troop, I am a soldier—­and nothing else; so best.  I shall be nothing else as long as I live.  Pardieu, though!  I don’t know what one wants better; it is a good life, as life goes.  One must not turn compliments to great ladies, that is all—­not much of a deprivation there.  The chessmen are the better for that; her Maltese dog would have broken them all the first time it upset their table!”

He laughed a little as he went on smoking; the old carelessness, mutability, and indolent philosophies were with him still, and were still inclined to thrust away and glide from all pain, as it arose.  Though much of gravity and of thoughtfulness had stolen on him, much of insouciance remained; and there were times when there was not a more reckless or a more nonchalant lion in all the battalions than “Bel-a-faire-peur.”  Under his gentleness there was “wild blood” in him still, and the wildness was not tamed by the fiery champagne-draught of the perilous, adventurous years he spent.

“I wonder if I shall never teach the Black Hawk that he may strike his beak in once too far?” he pondered, with a sudden darker, graver touch of musing; and involuntarily he stretched his arm out, and looked at the wrist, supple as Damascus steel, and at the muscles that were traced beneath the skin, as he thrust the sleeve up, clear, firm, and sinewy as any athlete’s.  He doubted his countenance then, fast rein as he held all rebellion in, close shield as he bound to him against his own passions in the breastplate of a soldier’s first duty—­obedience.

He shook the thought off him as he would have shaken a snake.  It had a terrible temptation—­a temptation which he knew might any day overmaster him; and Cecil, who all through his life had certain inborn instincts of honor, which served him better than most codes or creeds served their professors, was resolute to follow the military religion of obedience enjoined in the Service that had received him at his needs, and to give no precedent in his own person that could be fraught with dangerous, rebellious allurement for the untamed, chafing, red-hot spirits of his comrades, for whom he knew insubordination would be ruin and death—­whose one chance of reward, of success, and of a higher ambition lay in their implicit subordination to their chiefs, and their continuous resistance of every rebellious impulse.

Cecil had always thought very little of himself.

In his most brilliant and pampered days he had always considered in his own heart that he was a graceless fellow, not worth his salt, and had occasionally wondered, in a listless sort of way, why so useless a bagatelle a la mode as his own life was had ever been created.  He thought much the same now; but following his natural instincts, which were always the instincts of a gentleman, and of a generous temper, he did, unconsciously, make his life of much value among its present comrades.