It was a stone for the grave of Leon Ramon.  There was no other to remember the dead Chasseur; no other beside himself, save an old woman sitting spinning at her wheel under the low-sloping, shingle roof of a cottage by the western Biscayan sea, who, as she spun, and as the thread flew, looked with anxious, aged eyes over the purple waves where she had seen his father—­the son of her youth—­go down beneath the waters.

But the thread of her flax would be spun out, and the thread of her waning life be broken, ere ever the soldier for whom she watched would go back to her and to Languedoc.

For life is brutal; and to none so brutal as to the aged who remember so well, and yet are forgotten as though already they were amid the dead.

Cecil’s hand pressed the graver along the letters, but his thoughts wandered far from the place where he was.  Alone there, in the great sun-scorched barrack room, the news that he had read, the presence he had quitted, seemed like a dream.

He had never known fully all that he had lost until he had stood before the beauty of this woman, in whose deep imperial eyes the light of other years seemed to lie; the memories of other worlds seemed to slumber.

These blue, proud, fathomless eyes!  Why had they looked on him?  He had grown content with his fate; he had been satisfied to live and to fall a soldier of France; he had set a seal on that far-off life of his earlier time, and had grown to forget that it had ever been.  Why had chance flung him in her way that, with one careless, haughty glance, one smile of courteous pity, she should have undone in a moment all the work of a half-score years, and shattered in a day the serenity which it had cost him such weary self-contest, such hard-fought victory, to attain?

She had come to pain, to weaken, to disturb, to influence him, to shadow his peace, to wring his pride, to unman his resolve, as women do mostly with men.  Was life not hard enough here already, that she must make it more bitter yet to bear?

He had been content, with a soldier’s contentment, in danger and in duty; and she must waken the old coiled serpent of restless, stinging regret which he had thought lulled to rest forever!

“If I had my heritage!” he thought; and the chisel fell from his hands as he looked down the length of the barrack room with the blue glare of the African sky through the casement.

Then he smiled at his own folly, in dreaming idly thus of things that might have been.

“I will see her no more,” he said to himself.  “If I do not take care, I shall end by thinking myself a martyr—­the last refuge and consolation of emasculate vanity, of impotent egotism!”

For though his whole existence was a sacrifice, it never occurred to him that there was anything whatever great in its acceptation, or unjust in its endurance.  He thought too little of his life’s value, or of its deserts, even to consider by any chance that it had been harshly dealt with, or unmeritedly visited.