Spread them out." The savage authority of his general speech was softened for sake of his guest's presence, but there was a covert tone in the words that made Cigarette murmur to herself: "If he forget his promise, I will forgive him!" Cecil had not forgotten it; neither had he forgotten the lesson that this fair aristocrate had read him in the morning.

He saluted his chief again, set the chessbox down upon the ledge of the marble balustrade, and stood silent, without once glancing at the fair and haughty face that was more brilliant still in the African starlight than it had been in the noon sun of the Chasseurs' Chambree.

Courtesy was forbidden him as insult from a corporal to a nobly born beauty; he no more quarreled with the decree than with other inevitable consequences, inevitable degradations, that followed on his entrance as a private under the French flag.

He had been used to the impassable demarcations of Caste; he did not dispute them more now that he was without, than he had done when within, their magic pale.
The carvings were passed from hand to hand as the Marquis' six or eight guests, listless willing to be amused in the warmth of the evening after their dinner, occupied themselves with the ivory chess armies, cut with a skill and a finish worthy a Roman studio.

Praise enough was awarded to the art, but none of them remembered the artist, who stood apart, grave, calm, with a certain serene dignity that could not be degraded because others chose to treat him as the station he filled gave them fit right to do.
Only one glanced at him with a touch of wondering pity, softening her pride; she who had rejected the gift of those mimic squadrons.
"You were surely a sculptor once ?" she asked him with that graceful, distant kindness which she might have shown some Arab outcast.
"Never, madame." "Indeed! Then who taught you such exquisite art ?" "It cannot claim to be called art, madame." She looked at him with an increased interest: the accent of his voice told her that this man, whatever he might be now, had once been a gentleman.
"Oh, yes; it is perfect of its kind.