the
compassion than a scorpion that has spent all its noxious day stinging
at every point of uncovered flesh would merit tenderness from the hand
it had poisoned.

When he was swung down from the saddle and laid in front of a fire,
sheltered from the bitter north wind that was then blowing cruelly, the
bright, black, ape-like eyes of the Parisian diablotin opened with a
strange gleam in them.

"Picpon s'en souviendra," he murmured.

And Picpon had kept his word; he had remembered often, he remembered
now; standing on his head and thinking of his hundred Napoleons
surrendered because thieving and lying in the regiment gave pain to
that oddly prejudiced "ci-devant." This was the sort of loyalty that the
Franco-Arabs rendered; this was the sort of influence that the English
Guardsman exercised among his Roumis.

Meantime, while Picpon made a human cone of himself, to the admiration
of the polyglot crowd of the Algerine street, Cecil himself, having
watered, fed, and littered down his tired horse, made his way to a
little cafe he commonly frequented, and spent the few sous he could
afford on an iced draught of lemon-flavored drink. Eat he could
not; overfatigue had given him a nausea for food, and the last hour,
motionless in the intense glow of the afternoon sun, had brought that
racking pain through his temples which assailed him rarely now, but
which in his first years in Africa had given him many hours of agony. He
could not stay in the cafe; it was the hour of dinner for many, and the
odors, joined with the noise, were insupportable to him.

A few doors farther in the street, which was chiefly of Jewish and
Moslem shops, there was a quaint place kept by an old Moor, who had some
of the rarest and most beautiful treasures of Algerian workmanship in
his long, dark, silent chambers. With this old man Cecil had something
of a friendship; he had protected him one day from the mockery and
outrage of some drunken Indigenes, and the Moor, warmly grateful, was
ever ready to give him a cup of coffee in the stillness of his dwelling.
Its resort was sometimes welcome to him as the one spot, quiet and
noiseless, to which he could escape out of the continuous turmoil of
street and of barrack, and he went thither now. He found the old
man sitting cross-legged behind the counter; a noble-looking, aged
Mussulman, with a long beard like white silk, with cashmeres and
broidered stuffs of peerless texture hanging above his head