here, with no cares to think of
but my horse and my troop, I am a soldier--and nothing else; so best. I
shall be nothing else as long as I live. Pardieu, though! I don't know
what one wants better; it is a good life, as life goes. One must not
turn compliments to great ladies, that is all--not much of a deprivation
there. The chessmen are the better for that; her Maltese dog would have
broken them all the first time it upset their table!"

He laughed a little as he went on smoking; the old carelessness,
mutability, and indolent philosophies were with him still, and were
still inclined to thrust away and glide from all pain, as it arose.
Though much of gravity and of thoughtfulness had stolen on him, much
of insouciance remained; and there were times when there was not a
more reckless or a more nonchalant lion in all the battalions than
"Bel-a-faire-peur." Under his gentleness there was "wild blood" in him
still, and the wildness was not tamed by the fiery champagne-draught of
the perilous, adventurous years he spent.

"I wonder if I shall never teach the Black Hawk that he may strike his
beak in once too far?" he pondered, with a sudden darker, graver touch
of musing; and involuntarily he stretched his arm out, and looked at
the wrist, supple as Damascus steel, and at the muscles that were traced
beneath the skin, as he thrust the sleeve up, clear, firm, and sinewy as
any athlete's. He doubted his countenance then, fast rein as he held all
rebellion in, close shield as he bound to him against his own passions
in the breastplate of a soldier's first duty--obedience.

He shook the thought off him as he would have shaken a snake. It had a
terrible temptation--a temptation which he knew might any day overmaster
him; and Cecil, who all through his life had certain inborn instincts
of honor, which served him better than most codes or creeds served their
professors, was resolute to follow the military religion of obedience
enjoined in the Service that had received him at his needs, and to give
no precedent in his own person that could be fraught with dangerous,
rebellious allurement for the untamed, chafing, red-hot spirits of
his comrades, for whom he knew insubordination would be ruin and
death--whose one chance of reward, of success, and of a higher
ambition lay in their implicit subordination to their chiefs, and their
continuous resistance of every rebellious impulse.

Cecil had always thought very little of himself.