rect, as Alan Bertie before him had done with his
Irregular Cavalry in the Indian plains,--such a thought would never have
crossed him; he was far too thorough a soldier not then to have been not
only satisfied, but happy. What made his life in the barracks of Algiers
so bitter were the impotency, the subjection, the compelled obedience
to a bidding that he knew often capricious and unjust as it was cruel;
which were so unendurable to his natural pride, yet to which he had
hitherto rendered undeviating adhesion and submission, less for his own
sake than for that of the men around him, who, he knew, would back him
in revolt to the death, and be dealt with, for such loyalty to him, in
the fashion that the vivandiere's words had pictured with such terrible
force and truth.

"Is it worth while to go on with it? Would it not be the wiser way
to draw my own saber across my throat?" he thought, as the brutalized
companionship in which his life was spent struck on him all the more
darkly because, the night before, a woman's voice and a woman's face had
recalled memories buried for twelve long years.

But, after so long a stand-up fight with fate, so long a victory over
the temptation to let himself drift out in an opium-sleep from the world
that had grown so dark to him, it was not in him to give under now. In
his own way he had found a duty to do here, though he would have laughed
at anyone who should have used the word "duty" in connection with him.
In his own way, amid these wild spirits, who would have been blown from
the guns' mouths to serve him, he had made good the "Coeur vaillant se
fait Royaume" of his House. And he was, moreover, by this time, a French
soldier at heart and in habit, in almost all things--though the English
gentleman was not dead in him under the harness of a Chasseur d'Afrique.

This morning he roused the men of his Chambree with that kindly
gentleness which had gone so far in its novelty to attach their liking;
went through the customary routine of his past with that exactitude and
punctuality of which he was always careful to set the example; made his
breakfast off some wretched onion-soup and a roll of black bread; rode
fifty miles in the blazing heat of the African day at the head of a
score of his chasses-marais on convoy duty, bringing in escort a long
string of maize-wagons from the region of the Kabaila, which, without
such guard, might have been swooped down on and borne off by some
predat