already, that I am sure
the rest of the party will be tired of waiting."

Guess if her companion was loth to obey her.

They moved on for some time almost in silence. Cecil's thoughts were
busy with a picture too--not the less vivid because only her own
imagination had painted it. Her deep, dreamy eyes passed over the
landscape actually before them without catching one of its details: they
were looking on a desolate stony plain, cracked and calcined by a fierce
Indian sun--a few plumy palms in the background, and the rocky bed of a
river half dried up--in the foreground a crowd of wild barbaric
soldiery, with savage, swarthy features, bareheaded or white-turbaned;
mingled with these were horsemen in the uniform of our light dragoons,
sabring right and left mercilessly. In the very centre of the _melee_
was one figure, round which all the others seemed to group themselves as
mere accessories. She saw, very distinctly, the dark, determined face,
set, every line of it, in an unspeakable ferocity, with a world of
murderous meaning in the gleaming eyes--so distinctly that it drove out
the remembrance of the same man's face, expressive of nothing but
passionless indifference, though she looked upon it but a few minutes
since under the gray branches of the olive. She almost heard his clear,
imperious tones cheering on and rallying his troopers, when a ruder
voice broke her reverie.

"_Halte la!_"

If there was one thing that miserable muleteer-boy ought to have known
better than another, it was the insuperable objection entertained by the
Provencal peasant to any thing like trespass on his territory (the
touchiness of the _proprietaire_ bears generally an inverse ratio to the
extent of his possessions); yet, to make a short cut of about two
hundred yards, he had led his party through a gap in the low stone wall
over a strip of ground belonging to the very man who was least likely to
overlook the intrusion. Jean Duchesne had a bad name in the
neighborhood, and deserved it thoroughly; he was surly enough when sober
(which was the exception), but when drunk there were no bounds to his
blind, brutish ferocity, and his great personal strength made him a
formidable antagonist. He was not an agreeable object to contemplate,
that gaunt giant, as he stood there in his squalid, tattered dress, with
rough, matted hair, and face flushed by recent intemperance, and flecked
with livid stains of past debauches. You may see many such crow