Cecil's eyes were riveted on it. There were none near to see him; had
there been, they would have seen an agony in his eyes that no physical
misery, no torture of the battlefield, had brought there. His face was
bloodless, and his gaze strained through the gleam on to the fire-lit
group with a passionate intensity of yearning--he was well used to pain,
well used to self-control, well used to self-restraint, but for the
first time in his exile the bitterness of a struggle almost vanquished
him. All the old love of his youth went out to this man, so near to him,
yet so hopelessly severed from him; looking on the face of his friend,
a violence of longing shook him. "O God, if I were dead!" he thought,
"they might know then----"

He would have died gladly to have had that familiar hand once more touch
his; those familiar eyes once more look on him with the generous, tender
trust of old.

His brain reeled, his thoughts grew blind, as he stood there among his
horses, with the stir and tumult of the bivouac about him. There was
nothing simpler, nothing less strange, than that an English soldier
should visit the Franco-Arab camp; but to him it seemed like a
resurrection of the dead.

Whether it was a brief moment, or an hour through, that the circle stood
about the great, black caldron that was swinging above the flames, he
could not have told; to him it was an eternity. The echo of the mellow,
ringing tones that he knew so well came to him from the distance, till
his heart seemed breaking with but one forbidden longing--to look once
more in those brave eyes that made every coward and liar quail, and say
only, "I was guiltless."

It is bitter to know those whom we love dead; but it is more bitter to
be as dead to those who, once having loved us, have sunk our memory deep
beneath oblivion that is not the oblivion of the grave.

A while, and the group broke up and was scattered; the English traveler
throwing gold pieces by the score among the waiting troopers. "A
bientot!" they called to Cigarette, who nodded farewell to them with a
cigar in her mouth, and busied herself pouring some brandy into the old
copper caldron in which some black coffee and muddy water, three parts
sand, was boiling. A few moments later, and they were out of sight among
the confusion, the crowds, and the flickering shadows of the camp. When
they were quite gone, she came softly to him; she could not see him well
in the gloom, but she touched his hand