so
far beneath her that, without such aid from her, they could never have
addressed or have approached her.

"You have come, I trust, to withdraw your prohibition? Nothing will give
me greater pleasure than to bring his Majesty's notice to one of the
best soldiers his Army holds."

There was that in the words, gently as they were spoken, that recalled
him suddenly to himself; they had that negligent, courteous pity she
would have shown to some colon begging at her gates! He forgot--forgot
utterly--that he was only an African trooper. He only remembered that he
had once been a gentleman, that--if a life of honor and of self-negation
can make any so--he was one still. He advanced and bowed with the old
serene elegance that his bow had once been famed for; and she, well used
to be even overcritical in such trifles, thought, "That man has once
lived in courts!"

"Pardon me, madame, I do not come to trespass so far upon your
benignity," he answered, as he bent before her. "I come to express,
rather, my regret that you should have made one single error."

"Error!"--a haughty surprise glanced from her eyes as they swept over
him. Such a word had never been used to her in the whole course of her
brilliant and pampered life of sovereignty and indulgence.

"One common enough, madame, in your Order. The error to suppose that
under the rough cloth of a private trooper's uniform there cannot
possibly be such aristocratic monopolies as nerves to wound."

"I do not comprehend you." She spoke very coldly; she repented her
profoundly of her concession in admitting a Chasseur d'Afrique to her
presence.

"Possibly not. Mine was the folly to dream that you would ever do so.
I should not have intruded on you now, but for this reason: the
humiliation you were pleased to pass on me I could neither refuse nor
resent to the dealer of it. Had I done so, men who are only too loyal
to me would have resented with me, and been thrashed or been shot, as
payment. I was compelled to accept it, and to wait until I could return
your gift to you. I have no right to complain that you pained me with
it, since one who occupies my position ought, I presume, to consider
remembrance, even by an outrage, an honor done to him by the Princesse
Corona."

As he said the last words he laid on the table that stood near him the
gold of Chateauroy's insult. She had listened with a bewildering wonder,
held in check by the haughtier impulse of offense, that a m