True, France would fill the gaps up as fast as they occurred, and the “Monitor” would only allude to the present operations when it could give a flourishing line descriptive of the Arabs being driven back, decimated, to the borders of the Sahara.  But as the flourish of the “Monitor” would never reach a thousand little way-side huts, and sea-side cabins, and vine-dressers’ sunny nests, where the memory of some lad who had gone forth never to return would leave a deadly shadow athwart the humble threshold—­so the knowledge that they were only so many automata in the hands of government, whose loss would merely be noted that it might be efficiently supplied, was not that wine-draught of La Gloire which poured the strength and the daring of gods into the limbs of the men of Jena and of Austerlitz.  Still, there was a war-lust in them, and there was the fire of France; they fought not less superbly here, where to be food for jackal and kite was their likeliest doom, than their sires had done under the eagles of the First Empire, when the Conscript hero of to-day was the glittering Marshal of to-morrow.

Cecil had awakened while the camp still slept.  Do what he would, force himself into the fullness of this fierce and hard existence as he might, he could not burn out or banish a thing that had many a time haunted him, but never as it did now—­the remembrance of a woman.  He almost laughed as he lay there on a pile of rotting straw, and wrung the truth out of his own heart, that he—­a soldier of these exiled squadrons—­was mad enough to love that woman whose deep, proud eyes had dwelt with such serene pity upon him.

Yet his hand clinched on the straw as it had clinched once when the operator’s knife had cut down through the bones of his breast to reach a bullet that, left in his chest, would have been death.  If in the sight of men he had only stood in the rank that was his by birthright, he could have striven for—­it might be that he could have roused—­some answering passion in her.  But that chance was lost to him forever.  Well, it was but one thing more that was added to all that he had of his own will given up.  He was dead; he must be content, as the dead must be, to leave the warmth of kisses, the glow of delight, the possession of a woman’s loveliness, the homage of men’s honor, the gladness of successful desires, to those who still lived in the light he had quitted.  He had never allowed himself the emasculating indulgence of regret; he flung it off him now.

Flick-Flack—­coiled asleep in his bosom—­thrilled, stirred, and growled.  He rose, and, with the little dog under his arm, looked out from the canvas.  He knew that the most vigilant sentry in the service had not the instinct for a foe afar off that Flick-Flack possessed.  He gazed keenly southward, the poodle growling on; that cloud so dim, so distant, caught his sight.  Was it a moving herd, a shifting mist, a shadow-play between the night and dawn?