“I.  Ask if Corporal Victor, of the Chasseurs, can be permitted a moment’s interview with your mistress.  I come by permission,” he added, as the native hesitated between his fear of a Roumi and his sense of the appalling unfittingness of a private soldier seeking audience of a Spanish princesse.  The message was passed about between several of the household; at last a servant of higher authority appeared: 

“Madame permitted Corporal Victor to be taken to her presence.  Would he follow?”

He uncovered his head and entered, passing through several passages and chambers, richly hung and furnished; for the villa had been the “campagne” of an illustrious French personage, who had offered it to the Princesse Corona when, for some slight delicacy of health, the air of Algeria was advocated.  A singular sensation came on him, half of familiarity, half of strangeness, as he advanced along them; for twelve years he had seen nothing but the bare walls of barrack rooms, the goat-skin of douars, and the canvas of his own camp-tent.  To come once more, after so long an interval, amid the old things of luxury and grace that had been so long unseen wrought curiously on him.  He could not fairly disentangle past and present.  For the moment, as his feet fell once more on soft carpets, and his eyes glanced over gold and silver, malachite and bronze, white silk and violet damasks, he almost thought the Algerian years were a disordered dream of the night.

His spur caught in the yielding carpet, and his saber clashed slightly against it; as the rentree au caserne had done an hour before, the sound recalled the actual present to him.  He was but a French soldier, who went on sufferance into the presence of a great lady.  All the rest was dead and buried.

Some half dozen apartments, large and small, were crossed; then into that presence he was ushered.  The room was deeply shaded, and fragrant with the odors of the innumerable flowers of the Sahel soil; there was that about it which struck on him as some air—­long unheard, but once intimately familiar—­on the ear will revive innumerable memories.  She was at some distance from him, with the trailing draperies of eastern fabrics falling about her in a rich, unbroken, shadowy cloud of melting color, through which, here and there, broke threads of gold; involuntarily he paused on the threshold, looking at her.  Some faint, far-off remembrance stirred in him, but deep down in the closed grave of his past; some vague, intangible association of forgotten days, forgotten thoughts, drifted before him as it had drifted before him when first in the Chambree of his barracks he had beheld Venetia Corona.

She moved forward as her servant announced him; she saw him pause there like one spell-bound, and thought it the hesitation of one who felt sensitively his own low grade in life.  She came toward him with the silent, sweeping grace that gave her the carriage of an empress; her voice fell on his ear with the accent of a woman immeasurably proud, but too proud not to bend softly and graciously to those who were so far beneath her that, without such aid from her, they could never have addressed or have approached her.