The moment that he had dreaded came; the troops broke up and marched past the representative of their empire, the cavalry at the head of the divisions.  He passed among the rest; he raised his lance so that it hid his features as much as its slender shaft could do; the fair and noble face on which his glance flashed was very pale and very grave; the one beside her was sunny and frank, and unchanged by the years that had drifted by, and its azure eyes, so like her own, sweeping over the masses with all the swift, keen appreciation of a military glance, were so eagerly noting carriage, accouterment, harness, horses, that they never once fell upon the single soldier whose heart so unutterably longed for, even while it dreaded, his recognition.

Venetia gave a low, quick breath of mingled pain and relief as the last of the Chasseurs passed by.  The Seraph started, and turned his head.

“My darling!  Are you not well?”

“Perfectly!”

“You do not look so; and you forgot now to point me out this special trooper.  I forgot him too.”

“He goes there—­the tenth from here.”

Her brother looked; it was too late.

“He is taller than the others.  That is all I can see now that his back is turned.  I will seek him out when—­”

“Do no such thing!”

“And why?  It was your own request that I inquired—­”

“Think me changeable as you will.  Do nothing to seek him, to inquire for him—­”

“But why?  A man who at Zaraila—­”

“Never mind!  Do not let it be said you notice a Chasseur d’Afrique at my instance.”

The color flushed her face as she spoke; it was with the scorn, the hatred, of this shadow of an untruth with which she for the sole time in life soiled her lips.  He, noting it, shook himself restlessly in his saddle.  If he had not known her to be the noblest and the haughtiest of all the imperial women who had crowned his house with their beauty and their honor, he could have believed that some interest, degrading as disgrace, moved her toward this foreign trooper, and caused her altered wishes and her silence.  As it was, so much insult to her as would have existed in the mere thought was impossible to him; yet it left him annoyed and vaguely disquieted.

The subject did not wholly fade from his mind throughout the entertainments that succeeded to the military inspection in the great white tent glistening with gilded bees and brightened with tricolor standards which the ingenuity of the soldiers of the administration had reared as though by magic amid the barrenness of the country, and in which the skill of camp cooks served up a delicate banquet.  The scene was very picturesque, and all the more so for the widespread, changing panorama without the canvas city of the camp.  It was chiefly designed to pleasure the great lady who had come so far southward; all the resources which could be employed were exhausted to make the occasion