When her servant approached her now with Cecil’s message she hesitated some few moments in surprise.  She had not known that he was in her vicinity.  The story she had heard had been simply of two unnamed Chasseurs d’Afrique, and he himself might have fallen on the field weeks before, for aught that she had heard of him.  Some stray rumors of his defense of the encampment of Zaraila, and of the fine prowess shown in his last charge, alone had drifted to her.  He was but a trooper; and he fought in Africa.  The world had no concern with him, save the miniature world of his own regiment.

She hesitated some moments; then gave the required permission.  “He has once been a gentleman; it would be cruel to wound him,” thought the imperial beauty, who would have refused a prince or neglected a duke with chill indifference, but who was too generous to risk the semblance of humiliation to the man who could never approach her save upon such sufferance as was in itself mortification to one whose pride survived his fallen fortunes.

Moreover, the interest he had succeeded in awakening in her, the mingling of pity and of respect that his words and his bearing had aroused, was not extinct; had, indeed, only been strengthened by the vague stories that had of late floated to her of the day of Zaraila; of the day of smoke and steel and carnage, of war in its grandest yet its most frightful shape, of the darkness of death which the courage of human souls had power to illumine as the rays of the sun the tempest-cloud.  Something more like quickened and pleasured expectation than any one among her many lovers had ever had power to rouse, moved her as she heard of the presence of the man who, in that day, had saved the honor of his Flag.  She came of a heroic race; she had heroic blood in her; and heroism, physical and moral, won her regard as no other quality could ever do.  A man capable of daring greatly, and of suffering silently, was the only man who could ever hope to hold her thoughts.

The room was darkened from the piercing light without; and in its gloom, as he was ushered in, the scarlet of her cashmere and the gleam of her fair hair was all that, for the moment, he could see.  He bowed very low that he might get his calmness back before he looked at her; and her voice in its lingering music came on his ear.

“You have found my chain, I think?  I lost it in riding yesterday.  I am greatly indebted to you for taking care of it.”

She felt that she could only thank, as she would have thanked an equal who should have done her this sort of slight service, the man who had brought to her the gold pieces with which his Colonel had insulted him.

“It is I, madame, who am the debtor of so happy an accident.”

His words were very low, and his voice shook a little over them; he was thinking not of the jeweled toy that he came here to restore, but of the inheritance that had passed away from him forever, and which, possessed, would have given him the title to seek what his own efforts could do to wake a look of tenderness in those proud eyes which men ever called so cold, but which he felt might still soften, and change, and grow dark with the thoughts and the passions of love, if the soul that gazed through them were but once stirred from its repose.