with his arms folded on the sill and a short pipe in his
teeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose heavy fumes and
clouds of smoke still hung heavily on the air within.

The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where the yellow
leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the gray, uneven
stones. The clamor of the applause and the ring of the music from the
dancing-hall echoed with a whirling din in his ear, and made in sharper,
stranger contrast the quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starry
sky above its four high walls.

He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the noise about him;
there was always noise of some sort in the clangor and tumult of barrack
or bivouac life, and he had grown to heed it no more than he heeded
the roar of desert beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or the
hills, but looked dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with the
sear gourd leaves and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and his
future were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den on
which he gazed.

Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the exercise-ground
for the first time, to see of what mettle he was made, the instructor
had watched him with amazed eyes, muttering to himself, "This is no raw
recruit,--this fellow! What a rider! Dieu de Dieu! he knows more than
we can teach. He has served before now--served in some emperor's picked
guard!"

And when he had passed from the exercising-ground to the campaign,
the Army had found him one of the most splendid of its many splendid
soldiers; and in the daily folios there was no page of achievements, of
exploits, of services, of dangers, that showed a more brilliant array
of military deserts than his. Yet, for many years, he had been passed by
unnoticed. He had now not even the cross on his chest, and he had only
slowly and with infinite difficulty been promoted so far as he stood
now--a Corporal in the Chasseurs d'Afrique--a step only just accorded
him because wounds innumerable and distinctions without number in
countless skirmishes had made it impossible to cast him wholly aside any
longer.

The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man--his Chief.

Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they could come
into actual contact, that merciless weight of animosity, from the great
man to his soldier had lain on the other like iron, and clogged him
from all advancement. His thoughts