The Princesse glanced at both; then she stooped her elegant head
slightly to the Marquis.
"Do not blame your Corporal unjustly through me, I pray you. He refused
any price, but he offered them to me very gracefully as a gift, though
of course it was not possible that I should accept them so."
"The man is the most insolent in the service," muttered her host, as he
motioned Cecil back off the terrace. "Get you gone, sir, and leave your
toys here, or I will have them broken up by a hammer."
The words were low, that they should not offend the ears of the great
ladies who were his listeners; but they were coarsely savage in their
whispered command, and the Princesse heard them.
"He has brought his Chasseur here only to humiliate him," she thought,
with the same thought that flashed through the mind of the Little
Friend of the Flag where she hid among her rhododendrons. Now the dainty
aristocrate was very proud, but she was not so proud but that justice
was stronger in her than pride; and a noble, generous temper mellowed
the somewhat too cold and languid negligence of one of the fairest and
haughtiest women that ever adorned a court. She was too generous not to
rescue anyone who suffered through her the slightest injustice, not to
interfere when through her any misconception lighted on another;
she saw, with her rapid perception and sympathy, that the man whom
Chateauroy addressed with the brutal insolence of a bully to his
disobedient dog, had once been a gentlemen, though he now held but the
rank of a sous-officier in the Algerian Cavalry, and she saw that he
suffered all the more keenly under an outrage he had no power to resist
because of that enforced serenity, that dignity of silence and of
patience, with which he stood before his tyrant.
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