“Wait,” she said, moving a little toward them, while she let her eyes rest on the carver of the sculptures with a grave compassion, though she addressed his chief.  “You wholly mistake me.  I laid no blame whatever on your Corporal.  Let him take the chessmen back with him; I would on no account rob him of them.  I can well understand that he does not care to part with such masterpieces of his art; and that he would not appraise them by their worth in gold only shows that he is a true artist, as doubtless also he is a true soldier.”

The words were spoken with a gracious courtesy; the clear, cold tone of her habitual manner just marking in them still the difference of caste between her and the man for whom she interceded, as she would equally have interceded for a dog who should have been threatened with the lash because he had displeased her.  That very tone struck a sharper blow to Cecil than the insolence of his commander had power to deal him.  His face flushed a little; he lifted his cap to her with a grave reverence, and moved away.

“I thank you, madame.  Keep them, if you will so far honor me.”

The words reached only her ear.  In another instant he had passed away down the terrace steps, obedient to his chief’s dismissal.

“Ah! have no kind scruples in keeping them, madame,” Chateauroy laughed to her, as she still held in her hand, doubtfully, the White Sheik of the chess Arabs; “I will see that Bel-a-faire-peur, as they call him, does not suffer by losing these trumperies, which, I believe, old Zist-et-Zest, a veteran of ours and a wonderful carver, had really far more to do with producing than he.  You must not let your gracious pity be moved by such fellows as these troopers of mine; they are the most ingenious rascals in the world, and know as well how to produce a dramatic effect in your presence as they do how to drink and to swear when they are out of it.”

“Very possibly,” she said, with an indolent indifference; “but that man was no actor, and I never saw a gentleman if he have not been one.”

“Like enough,” answered the Marquis.  “I believe many ‘gentlemen’ come into our ranks who have fled their native countries and broken all laws from the Decalogue to the Code Napoleon.  So long as they fight well, we don’t ask their past criminalities.  We cannot afford to throw away a good soldier because he has made his own land too hot to hold him.”

“Of what country is your Corporal, then?”

“I have not an idea.  I imagine his past must have been something very black, indeed, for the slightest trace of it has never, that I know of, been allowed to let slip from him.  He encourages the men in every insubordination, buys their favor with every sort of stage trick, thinks himself the finest gentleman in the whole brigades of Africa, and ought to have been shot long ago, if he had had his real deserts.”

She let her glance dwell on him with a contemplation that was half contemptuous amusement, half unexpressed dissent.