Do nothing to seek him, to inquire for
him--"

"But why? A man who at Zaraila--"

"Never mind! Do not let it be said you notice a Chasseur d'Afrique at my
instance."

The color flushed her face as she spoke; it was with the scorn, the
hatred, of this shadow of an untruth with which she for the sole time
in life soiled her lips. He, noting it, shook himself restlessly in his
saddle. If he had not known her to be the noblest and the haughtiest of
all the imperial women who had crowned his house with their beauty and
their honor, he could have believed that some interest, degrading as
disgrace, moved her toward this foreign trooper, and caused her altered
wishes and her silence. As it was, so much insult to her as would have
existed in the mere thought was impossible to him; yet it left him
annoyed and vaguely disquieted.

The subject did not wholly fade from his mind throughout the
entertainments that succeeded to the military inspection in the great
white tent glistening with gilded bees and brightened with tricolor
standards which the ingenuity of the soldiers of the administration had
reared as though by magic amid the barrenness of the country, and in
which the skill of camp cooks served up a delicate banquet. The scene
was very picturesque, and all the more so for the widespread, changing
panorama without the canvas city of the camp. It was chiefly designed to
pleasure the great lady who had come so far southward; all the resources
which could be employed were exhausted to make the occasion memorable
and worthy of the dignity of the guests whom the Viceroy of the Empire
delighted to honor. Yet she, seated there on his right hand, where
the rich skins and cashmeres and carpets were strewn on a dais, saw in
reality little save a confused blending of hues, and metals, and orders,
and weapons, and snowy beards, and olive faces, and French elegance and
glitter fused with the grave majesty of Arab pomp. For her thoughts were
not with the scene around her, but with the soldier who was without in
that teeming crowd of tents, who lived in poverty, and danger, and the
hard slavery of unquestioning obedience, and asked only to be as one
dead to all who had known and loved him in his youth. It was in
vain that she repelled the memory; it usurped her, and would not be
displaced.

Meantime, in another part of the camp, the heroine of Zaraila was
feasted, not less distinctively, if more noisily and more familiarly, by
the yo