In the corner was written, “Villa Aiaussa, Algiers.”  He thrust it in the folds of his sash, and turned within.

“Do you know her?” he asked Ben Arsli.

The old man shook his head.

“She is the most beautiful of thy many fair Frankish women.  I never saw her till to-day.  But listen here.  Touching these ivory toys—­if thou does not bring henceforth to me all the work in them that thou doest, thou shalt never come here more to meet the light of her eyes.”

Cecil smiled and pressed the Moslem’s hand.

“I kept them away because you would have given me a hundred piasters for what had not been worth one.  As for her eyes, they are stars that shine on another world than an African trooper’s.  So best!”

Yet they were stars of which he thought more, as he wended his way back to the barracks, than of the splendid constellations of the Algerian evening that shone with all the luster of the day, but with the soft, enchanted light which transfigured sea, and earth, and sky as never did the day’s full glow, as he returned to the mechanical duties, to the thankless services, to the distasteful meal, to the riotous mirth, to the coarse comradeship, which seemed to him to-night more bitter than they had ever done since his very identity, his very existence, had been killed and buried past recall, past resurrection, under the kepi d’ordonnance of a Chasseur d’Afrique.

Meanwhile the Princess Corona drove homeward—­homeward to where a temporary home had been made by her in the most elegant of the many snow-white villas that stud the sides of the Sahel and face the bright bow of the sunlit bay; a villa with balconies, and awnings, and cool, silent chambers, and rich, glowing gardens, and a broad, low roof, half hidden in bay and orange and myrtle and basilica, and the liquid sound of waters bubbling beneath a riotous luxuriance of blossom.

Mme. la Princesse passed from her carriage to her own morning room and sank down on a couch, a little listless and weary with her search among the treasures of the Algerine bazaars.  It was purposeless work, after all.  Had she not bronzes, and porcelains, and bric-a-brac, and objets d’art in profusion in her Roman villa, her Parisian hotel, her great, grim palace in Estremadura.

“Not one of those things do I want—­not one shall I look at twice.  The money would have been better at the soldiers’ hospital,” she thought, while her eyes dwelt on a chess-table near her—­a table on which the mimic hosts of Chasseurs and Arabs were ranged in opposite squadrons.

She took the White King in her hand and gazed at it with a certain interest.

“That man has been noble once,” she thought.  “What a fate—­what a cruel fate!”