The hand of a broad-chested, black-visaged veteran of Chasseurs fell on his shoulder, and the wooden rim of a little wine-cup was thrust toward him with the proffered drink.  It startled him and recalled him to the consciousness of where he was.  He stared one moment absently in the trooper’s amazed face, and then shook him off with a suddenness that tossed back the cup to the ground; and, holding the journal clinched close in his hand, went swiftly through the masses of the people—­out and away, he little noted where—­till he had forced his road beyond the gates, beyond the town, beyond all reach of its dust and its babble and its discord, and was alone in the farther outskirts, where to the north the calm, sunlit bay slept peacefully with a few scattered ships riding at anchor, and southward the luxuriance of the Sahel stretched to meet the wide and cheerless plateaus, dotted with the conical houses of hair, and desolate as though the locust-swarm had just alighted there to lay them waste.

Reaching the heights he stood still involuntarily, and looked down once more on the words that told him of his birthright; in the blinding, intense light of the African day they seemed to stand out as though carved in stone; and as he read them once more a great darkness passed over his face—­this heritage was his, and he could never take it up; this thing had come to him, and he must never claim it.  He was Viscount Royallieu as surely as any of his fathers had been so before him, and he was dead forever in the world’s belief; he must live, and grow old, and perish by shot or steel, by sickness or by age, with his name and his rights buried, and his years passed as a private soldier of France.

The momentary glow which had come to him, with the sudden resurrection of hope and of pride, faded utterly as he slowly read and re-read the lines of the journal on the broken terraces of the hill-side, where the great fig trees spread their fantastic shadows, and through a rocky channel a russet stream of shallow waters threaded its downward path under the reeds, and no living thing was near him save some quiet browsing herds far off, and their Arab shepherd-lad that an artist might have sketched as Ishmael.  What his future might have been rose before his thoughts; what it must be rose also, bitterly, blackly, drearily in contrast.  A noble without even a name; a chief of his race without even the power to claim kinship with that race; owner by law of three thousand broad English acres, yet an exile without freedom to set foot on his native land; by heritage one among the aristocracy of England, by circumstances, now and forever, till an Arab bullet should cut in twain his thread of life, a soldier of the African legions, bound to obey the commonest and coarsest boor that had risen to a rank above him:  this was what he knew himself to be, and knew that he must continue to be without one appeal against it, without once stretching out his hand toward his right of birth and station.