at that beauty which could never be his, which could never lighten for him even with the smile that a woman may give her equal or her friend.  She could never be aught to him save one more memory of pain, save one remembrance the more to embitter the career which not even hope would ever illumine.  He knew that it was only madness to go into her presence, and feed, with the cadence of her voice, the gold light of her hair, the grace and graciousness of her every movement, the love which she would deem such intolerable insult, that, did he ever speak it, she would order her people to drive him from her like a chidden hound.  He knew that; but he longed to indulge the madness, despite it; and he did so.  He went down into the court below, and found her suite.

“Tell your mistress that I, Louis Victor, have some jewels which belong to her, and ask her permission to restore them to her hands,” he said to one of her equerries.

“Give them to me, if you have picked them up,” said the man, putting out his hand for them.

Cecil closed his own upon them.

“Go and do as I bid you.”

The equerry paused, doubtful whether or no to resist the tone and the words.  A Frenchman’s respect for the military uniform prevailed.  He went within.

In the best chamber of the caravanserai Venetia Corona was sitting, listless in the heat, when her attendant entered.  The grandes dames who were her companions in their tour through the seat of war were gone to their siesta.  She was alone, with a scarlet burnous thrown about her, and upon her all the languor and idleness common to the noontide, which was still very warm, though, in the autumn, the nights were so icily cold on the exposed level of the plains.  She was lost in thought, moreover.  She had heard, the day before, a story that had touched her—­of a soldier who had been slain crossing the plains, and had been brought, through the hurricane and the sandstorm, at every risk, by his comrade, who had chosen to endure all peril and wretchedness rather than leave the dead body to the vultures and the kites.  It was a nameless story to her—­the story of two obscure troopers, who, for aught she knew, might have been two of the riotous and savage brigands that were common in the Army of Africa.  But the loyalty and the love shown in it had moved her; and to the woman whose life had been cloudless and cradled in ease from her birth, there was that in the suffering and the sacrifice which the anecdote suggested, that had at once the fascination of the unknown, and the pathos of a life so far removed from her, so little dreamed of by her, that all its coarser cruelty was hidden, while only its unutterable sadness and courage remained before her sight.

Had she, could she, ever have seen it in its realities, watched and read and understood it, she would have been too intensely revolted to have perceived the actual, latent nobility possible in such an existence.  As it was she heard but of it in such words as alone could meet the ear of a great lady; she gazed at it only in pity from a far-distant height, and its terrible tragedy had solemnity and beauty for her.