“Are they content, I wonder?” he thought, gazing down that fiery blaze of shadowless light.  “Do they ever remember?”

He thought of those for whose sakes he had become what he was.

The distant, mellow, ringing notes of a trumpet-call floated to his ear from the town at his feet; it was sounding the rentree en caserne.  Old instinct, long habit, made him start and shake his harness together and listen.  The trumpet-blast, winding cheerily from afar off, recalled him to the truth; summoned him sharply back from vain regrets to the facts of daily life.  It waked him as it wakes a sleeping charger; it roused him as it rouses a wounded trooper.

He stood hearkening to the familiar music till it had died away—­spirited, yet still lingering; full of fire, yet fading softly down the wind.  He listened till the last echo ceased; then he tore the paper that he held in strips, and let it float away, drifting down the yellow current of the reedy river channel; and he half drew from its scabbard the saber whose blade had been notched and dented and stained in many midnight skirmishes and many headlong charges under the desert suns, and looked at it as though a friend’s eye gazed at him in the gleam of the trusty steel.  And his soldier-like philosophy, his campaigner’s carelessness, his habitual, easy negligence that had sometimes been weak as water and sometimes heroic as martyrdom, came back to him with a deeper shadow on it, that was grave with a calm, resolute, silent courage.

“So best after all, perhaps,” he said half aloud, in the solitude of the ruined and abandoned mosque.  “He cannot well come to shipwreck with such a fair wind and such a smooth sea.  And I—­I am just as well here.  To ride with the Chasseurs is more exciting than to ride with the Pytchley; and the rules of the Chambree are scarce more tedious than the rules of a Court.  Nature turned me out for a soldier, though Fashion spoiled me for one.  I can make a good campaigner—­I should never make anything else.”

And he let his sword drop back again into the scabbard, and quarreled no more with fate.

His hand touched the thirty gold pieces in his sash.

He started, as the recollection of the forgotten insult came back on him.  He stood a while in thought; then he took his resolve.

A half hour of quick movement, for he had become used to the heat as an Arab and heeded it as little, brought him before the entrance-gates of the Villa Aioussa.  A native of Soudan, in a rich dress, who had the office of porter, asked him politely his errand.  Every indigene learns by hard experience to be courteous to a French soldier.  Cecil simply asked, in answer, if Mme. La Princesse were visible.  The negro returned cautiously that she was at home, but doubted her being accessible.  “You come from M. le Marquis?” he inquired.

“No; on my own errand.”

“You!” Not all the native African awe of a Roumi could restrain the contemptuous amaze in the word.