ne of troops.

It was the paradise of which she had dreamed; it was the homage of
the army she adored; it was one of those hours in which life is
transfigured, exalted, sublimated into a divine glory by the pure love
of a people; and yet in that instant, so long, so passionately desired,
the doom of all genius was hers. There was the stealing pain of a weary
unrest amid the sunlit and intoxicating joy of satisfied aspiration.

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 trave