Your very clever work can, of course, only be mine by purchase." And with that she laid aside the White King among his little troop of ivory Arabs and floated onward with her friends.

Cecil's face paled slightly under the mellow tint left there by the desert sun and the desert wind; he swept the chessmen into their walnut case and thrust them out of sight under his knapsack.

Then he stood motionless as a sentinel, with the great leopard skins and Bedouin banners behind him, casting a gloom that the gold points on his harness could scarcely break in its heavy shadow, and never moved till the echo of the voices, and the cloud of draperies, and the fragrance of perfumed laces, and the brilliancy of the staff officers' uniforms had passed away, and left the soldiers alone in their Chambre.

Those careless cold words from a woman's lips had cut him deeper than the stick could have cut him, though it had bruised his loins and lashed his breast; they showed all he had lost.
"What a fool I am still!" he thought, as he made his way out of the barrack room.

"I might have fairly forgotten by this time that I ever had the rights of a gentleman." So the carvings had won him one warm heart and one keen pang that day; the vivandiere forgave, the aristocrat stung him, by means of those snowy, fragile, artistic toys that he had shaped in lonely nights under canvas by ruddy picket-fires, beneath the shade of wild fig trees, and in the stir and color of Bedouin encampments.
"I must ask to be ordered out of the city," he thought, as he pushed his way through the crowds of soldiers and civilians.