It was a nameless
story to her--the story of two obscure troopers, who, for aught she
knew, might have been two of the riotous and savage brigands that were
common in the Army of Africa. But the loyalty and the love shown in
it had moved her; and to the woman whose life had been cloudless and
cradled in ease from her birth, there was that in the suffering and the
sacrifice which the anecdote suggested, that had at once the fascination
of the unknown, and the pathos of a life so far removed from her, so
little dreamed of by her, that all its coarser cruelty was hidden, while
only its unutterable sadness and courage remained before her sight.

Had she, could she, ever have seen it in its realities, watched and read
and understood it, she would have been too intensely revolted to have
perceived the actual, latent nobility possible in such an existence. As
it was she heard but of it in such words as alone could meet the ear of
a great lady; she gazed at it only in pity from a far-distant height,
and its terrible tragedy had solemnity and beauty for her.

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 s