day to be slain by the
slash of an Arab flissa, and rewarded for ten years' splendid service by
the distinctive badge of a corporal.

Yet it might be doubted if any life would have done for him what this
had done; it might be questioned if, judging a career not by its social
position, but by its effect on character, any other would have been
so well for him, or would equally have given steel and strength to the
indolence and languor of his nature as this did. In his old world he
would have lounged listlessly through fashionable seasons, and in an
atmosphere that encouraged his profound negligence of everything;
and his natural listlessness would have glided from refinement to
effeminacy, and from lazy grace to blase inertia.

The severity and the dangers of the campaigns with the French army had
roused the sleeping lion in him, and made him as fine a soldier as ever
ranged under any flag. He had suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved,
hated, endured, and even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and a
vividness that he had never dreamed possible in his calm, passionless,
insouciant world of other days. It developed him into a magnificent
soldier--too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the service he
had adopted; not to, oftentimes, almost forget that he had ever lived
under any other flag than that tricolor which he followed and defended
now.

The quaint, heroic Norman motto of his ancestors, carved over the gates
of Royallieu--"Coeur Vaillant Se Fait Royaume"--verified itself in
his case. Outlawed, beggared, robbed at a stroke of every hope and
prospect--he had taken his adversity boldly by the beard, and had
made himself at once a country and a kingdom among the brave, fierce,
reckless, loyal hearts of the men who came from north, south, east, and
west--driven by every accident, and scourged by every fate--to fill up
the battalions of North Africa.

As he went now, in the warmth of the after-glow, he turned up into
the Rue Babazoum, and paused before the entrance of a narrow, dark,
tumble-down, picturesque shop, half like a stall of a Cairo bazaar; half
like a Jew's den in a Florentine alley.

A cunning, wizen head peered out at him from the gloom.

"Ah, ha! Good-even, Corporal Victor!"

Cecil, at the words, crossed the sill and entered.

"Have you sold any?" he asked. There was a slight constraint and
hesitation in the words, as of one who can never fairly bend his spirit
to the yoke of barter.