still over their watch-fires, and the
wild Bedouins load it with guttural curses--their lips white with hatred
and remembered fear: they do not forget how far and fast they fled into
their desert strong-holds, and never could shake off the light cloud of
whirling dust that told how Armand and his stanch gaze-hounds were hard
upon their trail.

Rheumatic fever, coming close on a severe bullet wound, had brought him
very near to death; and the first thing he heard when he began to
recover, was that he would never stand upright again.

He is answering Keene's salutation.

"My friend, you failed us last night at the Cercle, and yet we waited
for you long." A hoarse, hollow voice--very measured and slow, as if
carefully disciplined to repress groans--yet every now and then there
will come a modulation, that shows how rich and cheery it might have
been when trolling a _chanson a boire_--how clear and sonorous when,
over the stamping of hoofs and the rattle of scabbards, it rang out the
one word "Charge!"--how winning and musical when whispering into a
small, pink ear laid against his lips lovingly.

The Vicomte de Chateaumesnil cares for but one thing on earth now--play,
as deep as he can make or find it. It is not a pastime, or a
distraction, or an occasional fever-fit, but the sole interest of his
existence. A fearfully unworthy and unsatisfactory one, you will say.
Granted; but try and realize his condition.

He is not forty yet. All the passions of mature manhood were alive
within him; not one desire or impulse had been tamed by natural or even
premature decay at the time he was struck down, and cut off from every
object and aim of his former life, when it was too late to form or turn
to others. Imagine how eagerly his strong fiery nature must have grasped
at some of these--how it must have appreciated the alternations of
glory, pleasure, and peril--all worse than blanks now. You dare not
speak to him of woman's love. Worse than all other torments of the
Titan's bed of pain, would be wild dreams of impossible Oceanides!

Remember that his only change of scene is from one of the waters of
Marah to another, according to his own or his physician's fancy about
mineral springs. Remember, too, that the cleverest or the most sanguine
of them all have only ventured to promise an abatement of his agonies:
of their cessation they say no word; nor can they even prophesy that the
end will come quickly. He is not allowed to rea