ny a time long
before backed out of a throne-room.

As he went, his eyes caught the armies of the ivory chessmen; they stood
under glass, and had not been broken by her lapdog.

Milady, left alone there in her luxurious morning room, sat a while lost
in thought. He attracted her; he interested her; he aroused her sympathy
and her wonder as the men of her own world failed to do--aroused them
despite the pride which made her impatient of lending so much attention
to a mere Chasseur d'Afrique. His knowledge of the fact that he was in
reality the representative of his race, although the power to declare
himself so had been forever abandoned and lost, had given him in her
presence that day a certain melancholy, and a certain grave dignity that
would have shown a far more superficial observer than she was that he
had come of a great race, and had memories that were of a very different
hue to the coarse and hard life which he led now. She had seen much of
the world, and was naturally far more penetrative and more correct in
judgment than are most women. She discovered the ring of true gold
in his words, and the carriage of pure breeding in his actions. He
interested her more than it pleased her that he should. A man so utterly
beneath her; doubtless brought into the grade to which he had fallen by
every kind of error, of improvidence, of folly--of probably worse than
folly!

It was too absurd that she, so difficult to interest, so inaccessible,
so fastidious, so satiated with all that was brilliant and celebrated,
should find herself seriously spending her thoughts, her pity, and her
speculation on an adventurer of the African Army! She laughed a little
at herself as she stretched out her hand for a new volume of French
poems dedicated to her by their accomplished writer, who was a Parisian
diplomatist.

"One would imagine I was just out of a convent, and weaving a marvelous
romance from a mystery and a tristesse, because the first soldier I
notice in Algeria has a gentleman's voice and is ill treated by his
officers!" she thought with a smile, while she opened the poems which
had that day arrived, radiant in the creamy vellum, the white velvet,
and the gold of a dedication copy, with the coronet of the Corona
d'Amague on their binding. The poems were sparkling with grace and
elegant silvery harmonies; but they served ill to chain her attention,
for while she read her eyes wandered at intervals to the chess
battalions.