Rake asked him no more.  He had never had a harsh word from Cecil in their lives; but he knew him too well, for all that, to venture to press on him a question thus firmly put aside.  But his heart ached sorely for his master; he would so gladly have seen “the king among his own again,” and would have striven for the restoration as strenuously as ever a Cavalier strove for the White Rose; and he sat in silence, perplexed and ill satisfied, under the shelter of the rock, with the great, dim, desolate African landscape stretching before him, with here and there a gleam of light upon it when the wind swept the clouds apart.  His volatile speech was chilled, and his buoyant spirits were checked.  That Cecil was justly outlawed he would have thought it the foulest treason to believe for one instant; yet he felt that he might as soon seek to wrench up the great stones above him from their base as seek to change the resolution of this man, whom he had once known pliant as a reed and careless as a child.

They were before long in saddle again and off, the country growing wilder at each stride the horses took.

“It is all alive with Arabs for the next ten leagues,” said Cecil, as he settled himself in his saddle.  “They have come northward and been sweeping the country like a locust-swarm, and we shall blunder on some of them sooner or later.  If they cut me down, don’t wait; but slash my pouch loose and ride off with it.”

“All right, sir,” said Rake obediently; but he thought to himself, “Leave you alone with them demons?  Damn me if I will!”

And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the darkness of full night closing in on them, the skies being black with the heavy drift of rising storm-clouds.

Meanwhile Cigarette was feasting with the officers of the regiment.  The dinner was the best that the camp-scullions could furnish in honor of the two or three illustrious tourists who were on a visit to the headquarters of the Algerian Army; and the Little One, the heroine of Zaraila, and the toast of every mess throughout Algeria, was as indispensable as the champagnes.

Not that she was altogether herself to-night; she was feverish, she was bitter, she was full of stinging ironies; but that delicious gayety, like a kitten’s play, was gone from her, and its place, for the first time in her life was supplied by unreal and hectic excitation.  In truth, while she laughed, and coquetted, and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her, and very little of what she said or she did.  She was thinking of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and one who might never return.

It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her present; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting, unconquerable fear for another had approached her:  fear—­she had never known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him—­a man whose lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!