There was absolutely no hope possible in his future.  The uttermost that could ever come to him would be a grade something higher in the army that now enrolled him; the gift of the cross, or a post in the bureau.  Algerine warfare was not like the campaigns of the armies of Italy or the Rhine, and there was no Napoleon here to discern with unerring omniscience a leader’s genius under the kepi of a common trooper.  Though he should show the qualities of a Massena or a Kleber, the chances were a million to one that he would never get even as much as a lieutenancy; and the raids on the decimated tribes, the obscure skirmishes of the interior, though terrible in slaughter and venturesome enough, were not the fields on which great military successes were won and great military honors acquired.  The French fought for a barren strip of brown plateau that, gained, would be of little use or profit to them; he thought that he did much the same, that his future was much like those arid sand-plains, these thirsty, verdureless stretches of burned earth—­very little worth the reaching.

The heavy folds of a Bedouin’s haick, brushing the papers off the bench, broke the thread of his musings.  As he stooped for them, he saw that one was an English journal some weeks old.  His own name caught his eye—­the name buried so utterly, whose utterance in the Sheik’s tent had struck him like a dagger’s thrust.  The flickering light and darkness, as the awning waved to and fro, made the lines move dizzily upward and downward as he read—­read the short paragraph touching the fortunes of the race that had disowned him: 

“The Royallieu Succession.—­We regret to learn that the Rt.  Hon. Viscount Royallieu, who so lately succeeded to the family title on his father’s death, has expired at Mentone, whither his health had induced him to go some months previous.  The late Lord was unmarried.  His next brother was, it will be remembered, many years ago, killed on a southern railway.  The title, therefore, now falls to the third and only remaining son, the Hon. Berkeley Cecil, who, having lately inherited considerable properties from a distant relative, will, we believe, revive all the old glories of this Peerage, which have, from a variety of causes, lost somewhat of their ancient brilliancy.”

Cecil sat quite still, as he had sat looking down on the record of his father’s death, when Cigarette had rallied him with her gay challenge among the Moresco ruins.  His face flushed hotly under the warm, golden hue of the desert bronze, then lost all its color as suddenly, till it was as pale as any of the ivory he carved.  The letters of the paper reeled and wavered, and grew misty before his eyes; he lost all sense of the noisy, changing, polyglot crowd thronging past him; he, a common soldier in the Algerian Cavalry, knew that, by every law of birthright, he was now a Peer of England.