ign, instead
of going off to burn his brains out with brandy, if he had sous enough
to buy any, or to do some dexterous bit of thieving on a native, if he
had not. Many a time knowing him to be there sufficed to restrain the
talk around from lewdness and from ribaldry, and turn it into channels
at once less loathsome and more mirthful, because they felt that
obscenity and vulgarity were alike jarring on his ear, although he had
never more than tacitly shown that they were so. A precisian would have
been covered with their contumely and ridicule; a saint would have been
driven out from their midst with every missile merciless tongues and
merciless hands could pelt with; a martinet would have been cursed
aloud, and cheated, flouted, rebelled against, on every possible
occasion. But the man who was "one of them" entirely, while yet
simply and thoroughly a gentleman, had great influence--an influence
exclusively for good.

The Chambree was empty when he returned; the men were scattered over the
town in one of their scant pauses of liberty; there was only the dog of
the regiment, Flick-Flack, a snow-white poodle, asleep in the heat, on a
sack, who, without waking, moved his tail in a sign of gratification as
Cecil stroked him and sat down near; betaking himself to the work he had
in hand.

It was a stone for the grave of Leon Ramon. There was no other to
remember the dead Chasseur; no other beside himself, save an old woman
sitting spinning at her wheel under the low-sloping, shingle roof of a
cottage by the western Biscayan sea, who, as she spun, and as the thread
flew, looked with anxious, aged eyes over the purple waves where she had
seen his father--the son of her youth--go down beneath the waters.

But the thread of her flax would be spun out, and the thread of her
waning life be broken, ere ever the soldier for whom she watched would
go back to her and to Languedoc.

For life is brutal; and to none so brutal as to the aged who remember so
well, and yet are forgotten as though already they were amid the dead.

Cecil's hand pressed the graver along the letters, but his thoughts
wandered far from the place where he was. Alone there, in the great
sun-scorched barrack room, the news that he had read, the presence he
had quitted, seemed like a dream.

He had never known fully all that he had lost until he had stood before
the beauty of this woman, in whose deep imperial eyes the light of other
years seemed to lie; the