The eyes of Venetia Corona followed her with something of ineffable pity.  “Poor little unsexed child!” she thought.  “How pretty and how brave she is! and—­how true to him!”

The Seraph, beside her in the group around the flagstaff, smiled and turned to her.

“I said that little Amazon was in love with this fellow Victor; how loyally she stood up for him.  But I dare say she would be as quick to send a bullet through him, if he should ever displease her.”

“Why?  Where there is so much courage there must be much nobility, even in the abandonment of such a life as hers.”

“Ah, you do not know what half-French, half-African natures are.  She would die for him just now very likely; but if he ever forsake her, she will be quite as likely to run her dirk through him.”

“Forsake her!  What is he to her?”

There was a certain impatience in the tone, and something of contemptuous disbelief, that made her brother look at her in wonder.

“What on earth can the loves of a camp concern her?” he thought, as he answered:  “Nothing that I know of.  But this charming little tigress is very fond of him.  By the way, can you point the man out to me?  I am curious to see him.”

“Impossible!  There are ten thousand faces, and the cavalry squadrons are so far off.”

She spoke with indifference, but she grew a little pale as she did so, and the eyes that had always met his so frankly, so proudly, were turned from him.  He saw it, and it troubled him with a trouble the more perplexed that he could assign to himself no reason for it.  That it could be caused by any interest felt for a Chasseur d’Afrique by the haughtiest lady in all Europe would have been too preposterous and too insulting a supposition for it ever to occur to him.  And he did not dream the truth—­the truth that it was her withholding, for the first time in all her life, any secret from him which caused her pain; that it was the fear lest he should learn that his lost friend was living thus which haunted her with that unspoken anxiety.

They were traveling here with the avowed purpose of seeing the military operations of the south; she could not have prevented him from accepting the Marshal’s invitation to the review of the African Army without exciting comment and interrogation; she was forced to let events take their own course, and shape themselves as they would; yet an apprehension, a dread, that she could hardly form into distant shape, pursued her.  It weighed on her with an infinite oppression—­this story which she alone had had revealed to her; this life whose martyrdom she alone had seen, and whose secret even she could not divine.  It affected her more powerfully, it grieved her more keenly, than she herself knew.  It brought her close, for the only time in her experience, to a life absolutely without a hope, and one that accepted the despair of such a destiny with silent resignation; it moved her