“It must be a solace to many a weary hour in the barracks to be able to produce such beautiful trifles as these?” she said aloud.  “Surely you encourage such pursuits, monsieur?”

“Not I,” said Chateauroy, with a dash of his camp tone that he could not withhold.  “There are but two arts or virtues for a trooper to my taste—­fighting and obedience.”

“You should be in the Russian service, M. de Chateauroy,” said the lady with a smile, that, slight as it was, made the Marquis’ eyes flash fire.

“Almost I wish I had been,” he answered her; “men are made to keep their grades there, and privates who think themselves fine gentlemen receive the lash they merit.”

“How he hates his Corporal!” she thought while she laid aside the White King once more.

“Nay,” interposed Chateauroy, recovering his momentary self-abandonment, “since you like the bagatelles, do me honor enough to keep them.”

“Oh, no!  I offered your soldier his own price for them this morning, and he refused any.”

Chateauroy swung round.

“Ah, you dared refuse your bits of ivory when you were honored by an offer for them?”

Cecil stood silent; his eyes met his chief’s steadily; Chateauroy had seen that look when his Chasseur had bearded him in the solitude of his tent, and demanded back the Pearl of the Desert.

The Princesse glanced at both; then she stooped her elegant head slightly to the Marquis.

“Do not blame your Corporal unjustly through me, I pray you.  He refused any price, but he offered them to me very gracefully as a gift, though of course it was not possible that I should accept them so.”

“The man is the most insolent in the service,” muttered her host, as he motioned Cecil back off the terrace.  “Get you gone, sir, and leave your toys here, or I will have them broken up by a hammer.”

The words were low, that they should not offend the ears of the great ladies who were his listeners; but they were coarsely savage in their whispered command, and the Princesse heard them.

“He has brought his Chasseur here only to humiliate him,” she thought, with the same thought that flashed through the mind of the Little Friend of the Flag where she hid among her rhododendrons.  Now the dainty aristocrate was very proud, but she was not so proud but that justice was stronger in her than pride; and a noble, generous temper mellowed the somewhat too cold and languid negligence of one of the fairest and haughtiest women that ever adorned a court.  She was too generous not to rescue anyone who suffered through her the slightest injustice, not to interfere when through her any misconception lighted on another; she saw, with her rapid perception and sympathy, that the man whom Chateauroy addressed with the brutal insolence of a bully to his disobedient dog, had once been a gentlemen, though he now held but the rank of a sous-officier in the Algerian Cavalry, and she saw that he suffered all the more keenly under an outrage he had no power to resist because of that enforced serenity, that dignity of silence and of patience, with which he stood before his tyrant.