"
Cecil sat quite still, as he had sat looking down on the record of his
father's death, when Cigarette had rallied him with her gay challenge
among the Moresco ruins. His face flushed hotly under the warm, golden
hue of the desert bronze, then lost all its color as suddenly, till
it was as pale as any of the ivory he carved. The letters of the paper
reeled and wavered, and grew misty before his eyes; he lost all sense
of the noisy, changing, polyglot crowd thronging past him; he, a common
soldier in the Algerian Cavalry, knew that, by every law of birthright,
he was now a Peer of England.
His first thought was for the dead man. True, there had been little
amity, little intimacy, between them; a negligent friendliness, whenever
they had met, had been all that they had ever reached. But in their
childhood they had been carelessly kind to one another, and the memory
of the boy who had once played beside him down the old galleries and
under the old forests, of the man who had now died yonder where the
southern sea-board lay across the warm, blue Mediterranean, was alone on
him for the moment. His thoughts had gone back, with a pang, almost ere
he had read the opening lines, to autumn mornings in his youngest years
when the leaves had been flushed with their earliest red, and the brown,
still pools had been alive with water-birds, and the dogs had dropped
down charging among the flags and rushes, and his brother's boyish face
had laughed on him from the wilderness of willows, and his brother's
boyish hands had taught him to handle his first cartridge and to fire
his first shot.
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