It makes all the difference in life." "Yes--it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left, or--left out!" The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash of infinite sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with a shadow of keen pain passing over the bright, frank, laughing features of his sunburned face; he knew that the brief words held the whole history of a life.
"Won't there never be no hope, sir ?" he whispered, while his voice trembled a little under the long, fierce sweep of his yellow mustaches.
The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of Mazagran.
"Whom for?
Both of us?
Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and die! A splendid destiny." "No, sir," said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of his voice.

"You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again----" He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking.
The other moved with a certain impatience.
"How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a soldier of France ?--forget as I have forgotten it!" The audacious, irrepressible "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort," whom nothing could daunt and nothing could awe, looked penitent and ashamed as a chidden spaniel.
"I know, sir.

I have tried, many a year; but I thought, perhaps, as how his lordship's death--" "No life and no death can make any difference to me, except the death that some day an Arbico's lunge will give me; and that is a long time coming." "Ah, for God's sake, Mr.Cecil, don't talk like this!" The Chasseur gave a short, sharp shiver, and started at this name, as if a bullet had struck him.
"Never say that again!" Rake, Algerian-christened "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort," stammered a contrite apology.
"I never have done, sir--not for never a year; but it wrung it out of me like--you talking of wanting death in that way----" "Oh, I don't want death!" laughed the other, with a low, indifferent laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness all the while.

"I am of our friends the Spahis' opinion--that life is very pleasant with a handsome, well-chosen harem, and a good horse to one's saddle.

Unhappily harems are too expensive for Roumis! Yet I am not sure that I am not better amused in the Chasseurs than I was in the Household--specially when we are at war.