He caught
it in his hand and brought it up. It was the broken half of a chain
of gold, with a jewel in each link. He changed color as he saw it; he
remembered it as one that Venetia Corona had worn on the morning that
he had been admitted to her. It was of peculiar workmanship, and he
recognized it at once. He stood with the toy in his hand, looking long
at the shining links, with their flashes of precious stones. They seemed
to have voices that spoke to him of her about whose beautiful white
throat they had been woven--voices that whispered incessantly in his
ear, "Take up your birthright, and you will be free to sue to her at
least, if not to win her." No golden and jeweled plaything ever tempted
a starving man to theft as this tempted him now to break the pledge he
had just given.

His birthright! He longed for it for this woman's sake--for the sake,
at least, of the right to stand before her as an equal, and to risk his
chance with others who sought her smile--as he had never done for any
other thing which, with that heritage, would have become his. Yet he
knew that, even were he to be false to his word, and go forward and
claim his right, he would never be able to prove his innocence; he would
never hope to make the would believe him unless the real criminal made
that confession which he held himself forbidden, by his own past action,
ever to extort.

He gazed long at the broken, costly toy, while his heart ached with a
cruel pang; then he placed it in safety in the little blue enamel box,
beside the ring which Cigarette had flung back to him, and went onward
to the caravanserai. She was no longer there, in all probability; but
the lost bagatelle would give him, some time or another, a plea on which
to enter her presence. It was a pleasure to him to know that; though he
knew also that every added moment spent under the sweet sovereignty
of her glance was so much added pain, so much added folly, to the
dream-like and baseless passion with which she had inspired him.

The trifling incident of the goat's rescue and the chain's trouvaille,
slight as they were, still were of service to him. They called him back
from the past to the present; they broke the stupor of suffering that
had fastened on him; they recalled him to the actual world about him in
which he had to fulfill his duties as a trooper of France.

It was almost noon when, under the sun-scorched branches of the pine
that stretched its somber fans up agai