nk you so signally contrive to disgrace."

The words were far less than the tone they were spoken in, that gave
them all the insolence of so many blows, as he swung on his heel and
bent to the ladies of the party he escorted. Cecil stood mute; bearing
the rebuke as it became a Corporal to bear his Commander's anger; a very
keen observer might have seen that a faint flush rose over the sun tan
of his face, and that his teeth clinched under his beard; but he let no
other sign escape him.

The very self-restraint irritated Chateauroy, who would have been the
first to chastise the presumption of a reply, had any been attempted.

"Back to your place, sir!" he said, with a wave of his hand, as he might
have waved back a cur. "Teach your men the first formula of obedience,
at any rate!"

Cecil fell back in silence. With a swift, warning glance at Rake,--whose
mouth was working, and whose forehead was hot as fire, where he clinched
his lion-skin, and longed to be once free, to pull his chief down as
lions pull in the death spring,--he went to his place at the farther end
of the chamber and stood, keeping his eyes on the chess carvings, lest
the control which was so bitter to retain should be broken if he looked
on at the man who had been the curse and the antagonist of his whole
life in Algeria.

He saw nothing and heard almost as little of all that went on around
him; there had been a flutter of cloud-like color in his sight, a faint,
dreamy fragrance on the air, a sound of murmuring voices and of low
laughter; he had known that some guests or friends of the Marquis' had
come to view the barracks, but he never even glanced to see who or what
they were. The passionate bitterness of just hatred, that he had to
choke down as though it were the infamous instinct of some nameless
crime, was on him.

The moments passed, the hum of the voices floated to his ear; the ladies
of the party lingered by this soldier and by that, buying half the
things in the chamber, filling their hands with all the quaint trifles,
ordering the daggers and the flissas and the ornamented saddles and the
desert skins to adorn their chateaux at home; and raining down on the
troopers a shower of uncounted Napoleons until the Chasseurs, who had
begun to think their trades would take them to Beylick, thought instead
that they had drifted into dreams of El Dorado. He never looked up;
he heard nothing, heeded nothing; he was dreamily wondering whether he
sh