r, and the villainous blasphemy
and befouled merriment of the riotous barracks, that denied even the
peace and oblivion of sleep. They were years of infinite wretchedness
oftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty and devotion of the man who had
followed him into his exile. But, however wretched, they never wrung
a single regret or lament from Cecil. He had come out to this life;
he took it as it was. As, having lost the title to command, the high
breeding in him made him render implicitly the mute obedience which
was the first duty of his present position, so it made him accept, from
first to last, without a sign of complaint or of impatience, the altered
fortunes of his career. The hardest-trained, lowest-born, longest-inured
soldier in the Zephyr ranks did not bear himself with more apparent
content and more absolute fortitude than did the man who had used to
think it a cruelty to ride with his troop from Windsor to Wormwood
Scrubs, and had never taken the trouble to load his own gun any shooting
season, or to draw off his own coat any evening. He suffered acutely
many times; suffered till he was heart-sick of his life; but he never
sought to escape the slightest penalty or hardship, and not even Rake
ever heard from him a single syllable of irritation or of self-pity.

Moreover, the war-fire woke in him.

In one shape or another active service was almost always his lot, and
hot, severe campaigning was his first introduction to military life in
Algeria. The latent instinct in him--the instinct that had flashed out
during his lazy, fashionable calm in all moments of danger, in all days
of keen sport; the instinct that had made him fling himself into the
duello with the French boar, and made him mutter to Forest King, "Kill
me if you like, but don't fail me!"--was the instinct of the born
soldier. In peril, in battle, in reckless bravery, in the rush of the
charge and the excitement of the surprise, in the near presence of
death, and in the chase of a foe through a hot African night when both
were armed to the teeth, and one or both must fall when the grapple
came--in all these that old instinct, aroused and unloosed, made him
content; made him think that the life which brought them was worth the
living.

There had always been in him a reckless dare-devilry, which had slept
under the serene, effeminate insouciance of his careless temper and
his pampered habits. It had full rein now, and made him, as the army
affirmed,