Picpon was quite in love with his joke; it was only a good joke in his sight; and, indeed, men need to live as hardly as an African soldier lives, to estimate the full temptation that gold can have when you have come to look on a cat as very good eating, and to have nothing to gnaw but a bit of old shoe-leather through the whole of the long hours of a burning day of fatigue-duty; and to estimate, as well, the full width and depth of the renunciation that made him mutter now so valorously, “Dame!  I will give it up, then!”

Picpon did not know himself as he said it.  Yet he turned down into a lonely, narrow lane, under marble walls, overtopped with fig and palm from some fine gardens; undid the bag for the second time; whisked out the date-stones and threw them over the wall, so that they should be out of his reach if he repented; put back the Napoleons, closed the little sack, ran as hard as he could scamper to his destination, delivered his charge into the fair lady’s own hands, and relieved his feelings by a score of somersaults along the pavement as fast as ever he could go.

“Ma cantche!” he thought, as he stood on his head, with his legs at an acute angle in the air, in position very favored by him for moments of reflection—­he said his brain worked better upside down.  “Ma cantche!  What a weakness, what a weakness!  What remorse to have yielded to it!  Beneath you, Picpon—­utterly beneath you.  Just because that ci-devant says such follies please him in us!”

Picpon (then in his gamin stage) had been enrolled in the Chasseurs at the same time with the “ci-devant,” as they called Bertie, and, following his gamin nature, had exhausted all his resources of impudence, maliciousness, and power of tormenting, on the “aristocrat”—­somewhat disappointed, however, that the utmost ingenuities of his insolence and even his malignity never succeeded in breaking the “aristocrat’s” silence and contemptuous forbearance from all reprisal.  For the first two years the hell-on-earth—­which life with a Franco-Arab regiment seemed to Cecil—­was a hundredfold embittered by the brutalized jests and mosquito-like torments of this little odious chimpanzee of Paris.

One day, however, it chanced that a detachment of Chasseurs, of which Cecil was one, was cut to pieces by such an overwhelming mass of Arabs that scarce a dozen of them could force their way through the Bedouins with life; he was among those few, and a flight at full speed was the sole chance of regaining their encampment.  Just as he had shaken his bridle free of the Arab’s clutch, and had mowed himself a clear path through their ranks, he caught sight of his young enemy, Picpon, on the ground, with a lance broken off in his ribs; guarding his head, with bleeding hands, as the horses trampled over him.  To make a dash at the boy, though to linger a moment was to risk certain death; to send his steel through an Arab who came in his way; to lean down and catch