Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing; he had listened in silence, the darkness lowering still more heavily upon his swarthy features; only now he opened his lips for a few brief words: 

“Mon cher Duc, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm of her pity.  The fellow you inquire for was an outcast and an outlaw when he came to us.  He fights well—­it is often a blackguard’s virtue!”

His guest nodded and changed the subject; his impatience and aversion at the introduction of his sister’s name into the discussion made him drop the theme unpursued, and let it die out forgotten.

Venetia Corona associated with an Algerian trooper!  If Cigarette had been of his own sex he could have dashed the white teeth down her throat for having spoken of the two in one breath.

And as, later on, he stretched his gallant limbs out on his narrow camp pallet, tired with a long day in saddle under the hot African sun, the Seraph fell asleep with his right arm under his handsome golden head, and thought no more of this unknown French trooper.

But Cigarette remained wakeful.

She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, Etoile Filante, with her head on the beast’s glossy flank and her hand among his mane.  She often slept thus in camp, and the horse would lie still and cramped for hours rather than awaken her, or, if he rose, would take the most watchful heed to leave unharmed the slender limbs, the flushed cheeks, the frank, fair brow of the sleeper beneath him, that one stroke of his hoof could have stamped out into a bruised and shapeless mass.

To-night Etoile Filante slept, and his mistress was awake—­wide-awake, with her eyes looking out into the darkness beyond, with a passionate mist of unshed tears in them, and her mouth quivering with pain and with wrath.  The vehement excitation had not died away in her, but there had come with it a dull, spiritless, aching depression.  It had roused her to fury to hear the reference to her rival spoken—­of that aristocrat whose name had been on Cecil’s lips when he had been delirious.  She had kept his secret loyally, she had defended him vehemently; there was something that touched her to the core in the thought of the love with which he had recognized this friend who, in ignorance, spoke of him as of some unknown French soldier.  She could not tell what the history was, but she could divine nearly enough to feel its pathos and its pain.  She had known, in her short life, more of men and of their passions and of their fortunes than many lives of half a century in length can ever do; she could guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, the past which had exiled the man who had kept by him his lost mother’s ring as the sole relic of years to which he was dead so utterly as though he were lying in his coffin.  No matter what the precise reason was—­women, or debt, or accident, or ruin—­these two, who had been familiar comrades, were now as strangers to each other; the