“You have come, I trust, to withdraw your prohibition?  Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to bring his Majesty’s notice to one of the best soldiers his Army holds.”

There was that in the words, gently as they were spoken, that recalled him suddenly to himself; they had that negligent, courteous pity she would have shown to some colon begging at her gates!  He forgot—­forgot utterly—­that he was only an African trooper.  He only remembered that he had once been a gentleman, that—­if a life of honor and of self-negation can make any so—­he was one still.  He advanced and bowed with the old serene elegance that his bow had once been famed for; and she, well used to be even overcritical in such trifles, thought, “That man has once lived in courts!”

“Pardon me, madame, I do not come to trespass so far upon your benignity,” he answered, as he bent before her.  “I come to express, rather, my regret that you should have made one single error.”

“Error!”—­a haughty surprise glanced from her eyes as they swept over him.  Such a word had never been used to her in the whole course of her brilliant and pampered life of sovereignty and indulgence.

“One common enough, madame, in your Order.  The error to suppose that under the rough cloth of a private trooper’s uniform there cannot possibly be such aristocratic monopolies as nerves to wound.”

“I do not comprehend you.”  She spoke very coldly; she repented her profoundly of her concession in admitting a Chasseur d’Afrique to her presence.

“Possibly not.  Mine was the folly to dream that you would ever do so.  I should not have intruded on you now, but for this reason:  the humiliation you were pleased to pass on me I could neither refuse nor resent to the dealer of it.  Had I done so, men who are only too loyal to me would have resented with me, and been thrashed or been shot, as payment.  I was compelled to accept it, and to wait until I could return your gift to you.  I have no right to complain that you pained me with it, since one who occupies my position ought, I presume, to consider remembrance, even by an outrage, an honor done to him by the Princesse Corona.”

As he said the last words he laid on the table that stood near him the gold of Chateauroy’s insult.  She had listened with a bewildering wonder, held in check by the haughtier impulse of offense, that a man in this grade could venture thus to address, thus to arraign her.  His words were totally incomprehensible to her, though, by the grave rebuke of his manner, she saw that they were fully meant, and, as he considered, fully authorized by some wrong done to him.  As he laid the gold pieces down upon her table, an idea of the truth came to her.

“I know nothing of what you complain of; I sent you no money.  What is it you would imply?” she asked him, looking up from where she leaned back in the low couch into whose depth she had sunk as he had spoken.