urs the instructions he bore were in the tent of
the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, and he himself returned
to the caravanserai to fulfill with his own hand to the dead those last
offices which he would delegate to none. It was night when he arrived;
all was still and deserted. He inquired if the party of tourists was
gone; they answered him in the affirmative; there only remained the
detachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for a
while.

It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the great stars
shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that they made the
single grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with the somber fans of a
pine spread above it, and nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats.
The sullen echo of the soldiers' muskets gave its only funeral requiem;
and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time would come and
play, and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod,
its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains.

When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once again to
rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. Thrown down upon the
grave, he never moved as hour after hour went by. To others that lonely
and unnoticed tomb would be as nothing; only one among the thousand
marks left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savage
lusts of war. But to him it held all that had bound him to his lost
youth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of the
years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man had
followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for
his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled
forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished,
unavenged! It seemed to him like murder--murder with which his own hand
was stained.

The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had succeeded to the
storm of the past day there was not a sound except the bleating of the
young goats straying from the herd. He lay prostrate under the black
lengths of the pine; the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him; a
grief, acute as remorse, consumed him for the man who, following his
fate, had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the land
of his exile.

He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as through the
silence he heard a name whispered--the name of his childhood, of