While yet the caravanserai was distant, the piteous cries of a mother-goat caught his ear.  She was bleating beside a water-course, into which her kid of that spring had fallen, and whose rapid swell, filled by the recent storm, was too strong for the young creature.  Absorbed as he was in his own thoughts, the cry reached him and drew him to the spot.  It was not in him willingly to let any living thing suffer, and he was always gentle to all animals.  He stooped, and, with some little difficulty, rescued the little goat for its delighted dam.

As he bent over the water he saw something glitter beneath it.  He caught it in his hand and brought it up.  It was the broken half of a chain of gold, with a jewel in each link.  He changed color as he saw it; he remembered it as one that Venetia Corona had worn on the morning that he had been admitted to her.  It was of peculiar workmanship, and he recognized it at once.  He stood with the toy in his hand, looking long at the shining links, with their flashes of precious stones.  They seemed to have voices that spoke to him of her about whose beautiful white throat they had been woven—­voices that whispered incessantly in his ear, “Take up your birthright, and you will be free to sue to her at least, if not to win her.”  No golden and jeweled plaything ever tempted a starving man to theft as this tempted him now to break the pledge he had just given.

His birthright!  He longed for it for this woman’s sake—­for the sake, at least, of the right to stand before her as an equal, and to risk his chance with others who sought her smile—­as he had never done for any other thing which, with that heritage, would have become his.  Yet he knew that, even were he to be false to his word, and go forward and claim his right, he would never be able to prove his innocence; he would never hope to make the would believe him unless the real criminal made that confession which he held himself forbidden, by his own past action, ever to extort.

He gazed long at the broken, costly toy, while his heart ached with a cruel pang; then he placed it in safety in the little blue enamel box, beside the ring which Cigarette had flung back to him, and went onward to the caravanserai.  She was no longer there, in all probability; but the lost bagatelle would give him, some time or another, a plea on which to enter her presence.  It was a pleasure to him to know that; though he knew also that every added moment spent under the sweet sovereignty of her glance was so much added pain, so much added folly, to the dream-like and baseless passion with which she had inspired him.

The trifling incident of the goat’s rescue and the chain’s trouvaille, slight as they were, still were of service to him.  They called him back from the past to the present; they broke the stupor of suffering that had fastened on him; they recalled him to the actual world about him in which he had to fulfill his duties as a trooper of France.