He would have died gladly to have had that familiar hand once more touch his; those familiar eyes once more look on him with the generous, tender trust of old.

His brain reeled, his thoughts grew blind, as he stood there among his horses, with the stir and tumult of the bivouac about him.  There was nothing simpler, nothing less strange, than that an English soldier should visit the Franco-Arab camp; but to him it seemed like a resurrection of the dead.

Whether it was a brief moment, or an hour through, that the circle stood about the great, black caldron that was swinging above the flames, he could not have told; to him it was an eternity.  The echo of the mellow, ringing tones that he knew so well came to him from the distance, till his heart seemed breaking with but one forbidden longing—­to look once more in those brave eyes that made every coward and liar quail, and say only, “I was guiltless.”

It is bitter to know those whom we love dead; but it is more bitter to be as dead to those who, once having loved us, have sunk our memory deep beneath oblivion that is not the oblivion of the grave.

A while, and the group broke up and was scattered; the English traveler throwing gold pieces by the score among the waiting troopers.  “A bientot!” they called to Cigarette, who nodded farewell to them with a cigar in her mouth, and busied herself pouring some brandy into the old copper caldron in which some black coffee and muddy water, three parts sand, was boiling.  A few moments later, and they were out of sight among the confusion, the crowds, and the flickering shadows of the camp.  When they were quite gone, she came softly to him; she could not see him well in the gloom, but she touched his hand.

“Dieu! how cold you are!  He is gone.”

He could not answer her to thank her, but he crushed in his the little, warm, brown palm.  She felt a shiver shake his limbs.

“Is he your enemy?” she asked.

“No.”

“What, then?”

“The man I love best on earth.”

“Ah!” She had felt a surprise she had not spoke that he should flee thus from any foe.  “He thinks you dead, then?”

“Yes.”

“And must always think so?”

“Yes.”  He held her hand still, and his own wrung it hard—­the grasp of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman.  “Child, you are bold, generous, pitiful; for God’s sake, get me sent out of this camp to-night.  I am powerless.”

There was that in the accent which struck his listener to the heart.  He was powerless, fettered hand and foot as though he were a prisoner; a night’s absence, and he would be shot as a deserter.  He had grown accustomed to this rendering up of all his life to the rules of others; but now and then the galled spirit chafed, the netted stag strained at the bonds.

“I will try,” said Cigarette simply, without any of her audacity or of her vanity in the answer.  “Go you to the fire; you are cold.”