only been taken up at any odd ten minutes that had happened to be unoccupied during the last three or four years.  The chessmen had been about with him in so many places and under canvas so long, from the time that he chipped out their first Zouave pawn, as he lay in the broiling heat of Oran prostrate by a dry brook’s stony channel, that he scarcely cared to part with them, and had refused to let Rake offer them for sale, with all the rest of the carvings.  Stooping over them, he did not notice the doors open at the end of the barracks until a sudden silence that fell on the babble and uproar round him made him look up; then he rose and gave the salute with the rest of his discomfited and awestricken troopers.  Chateauroy with a brilliant party had entered.

The Colonel flashed an eagle glance round.

“Fine discipline!  You shall go and do this pretty work at Beylick!”

The soldiers stood like hounds that see the lash; they knew that he was like enough to carry out his threat; though they were doing no more than they had always tacit, if not open, permission to do.  Cecil advanced, and fronted him.

“Mine is the blame, mon Commandant!”

He spoke simply, gently, boldly; standing with the ceremony that he never forgot to show to their chief, where the glow of African sunlight through the casement of the barracks fell full across his face, and his eyes met the dark glance of the “Black Hawk” unflinchingly.  He never heeded that there was a gay, varied, numerous group behind Chateauroy; visitors who were looking over the barrack; he only heeded that his soldiers were unjustly attacked and menaced.

The Marquis gave a grim, significant smile, that cut like so much cord of the scourge.

“Wherever there is insubordination in the regiment, the blame is very certain to be yours!  Corporal Victor, if you allow your Chambre to be turned into the riot of a public fair, you will soon find yourself degraded from the rank you so signally contrive to disgrace.”

The words were far less than the tone they were spoken in, that gave them all the insolence of so many blows, as he swung on his heel and bent to the ladies of the party he escorted.  Cecil stood mute; bearing the rebuke as it became a Corporal to bear his Commander’s anger; a very keen observer might have seen that a faint flush rose over the sun tan of his face, and that his teeth clinched under his beard; but he let no other sign escape him.

The very self-restraint irritated Chateauroy, who would have been the first to chastise the presumption of a reply, had any been attempted.

“Back to your place, sir!” he said, with a wave of his hand, as he might have waved back a cur.  “Teach your men the first formula of obedience, at any rate!”

Cecil fell back in silence.  With a swift, warning glance at Rake,—­whose mouth was working, and whose forehead was hot as fire, where he clinched his lion-skin, and longed to be once free, to pull his chief down as lions pull in the death spring,—­he went to his place at the farther end of the chamber and stood, keeping his eyes on the chess carvings, lest the control which was so bitter to retain should be broken if he looked on at the man who had been the curse and the antagonist of his whole life in Algeria.