ling here with the avowed purpose of seeing the military
operations of the south; she could not have prevented him from accepting
the Marshal's invitation to the review of the African Army without
exciting comment and interrogation; she was forced to let events
take their own course, and shape themselves as they would; yet an
apprehension, a dread, that she could hardly form into distant shape,
pursued her. It weighed on her with an infinite oppression--this story
which she alone had had revealed to her; this life whose martyrdom she
alone had seen, and whose secret even she could not divine. It affected
her more powerfully, it grieved her more keenly, than she herself knew.
It brought her close, for the only time in her experience, to a life
absolutely without a hope, and one that accepted the despair of such
a destiny with silent resignation; it moved her as nothing less, as
nothing feebler or of more common type could ever have found power to
do. There were a simplicity and a greatness in the mute, unpretentious,
almost unconscious, heroism of this man, who, for the sheer sake of
that which he deemed the need of "honor," accepted the desolation of his
entire future, which attracted her as nothing else had ever done, which
made her heart ache when she looked at the glitter of the Franco-Arab
squadrons, where their sloped lances glistened in the sun, with a
pang that she had never felt before. Moreover, as the untutored,
half-barbaric, impulsive young heart of Cigarette had felt, so felt the
high-bred, cultured, world-wise mind of Venetia Corona--that this
man's exile was no shame, but some great sacrifice; a sacrifice whose
bitterness smote her with its own suffering, whose mystery wearied her
with its own perplexity, as she gazed down the line of the regiments to
where the shot-bruised Eagle of Zaraila gleamed above the squadrons of
the Chasseurs d'Afrique.

He, in his place among those squadrons, knew her, though so far distant,
and endured the deadliest trial of patience which had come to him while
beneath the yoke of African discipline. To leave his place was to incur
the heaviest punishment; yet he could almost have risked that sentence
rather than wait there. Only seven days had gone by since he had been
with her under the roof of the caravanserai; but it seemed to him as
if these days had aged him more than all the twelve years that he had
passed upon the Algerian soil. He was thankful that the enmity of his
re