lla had been the
"campagne" of an illustrious French personage, who had offered it to the
Princesse Corona when, for some slight delicacy of health, the air
of Algeria was advocated. A singular sensation came on him, half of
familiarity, half of strangeness, as he advanced along them; for twelve
years he had seen nothing but the bare walls of barrack rooms, the
goat-skin of douars, and the canvas of his own camp-tent. To come once
more, after so long an interval, amid the old things of luxury and grace
that had been so long unseen wrought curiously on him. He could not
fairly disentangle past and present. For the moment, as his feet fell
once more on soft carpets, and his eyes glanced over gold and silver,
malachite and bronze, white silk and violet damasks, he almost thought
the Algerian years were a disordered dream of the night.

His spur caught in the yielding carpet, and his saber clashed slightly
against it; as the rentree au caserne had done an hour before, the sound
recalled the actual present to him. He was but a French soldier, who
went on sufferance into the presence of a great lady. All the rest was
dead and buried.

Some half dozen apartments, large and small, were crossed; then into
that presence he was ushered. The room was deeply shaded, and fragrant
with the odors of the innumerable flowers of the Sahel soil; there was
that about it which struck on him as some air--long unheard, but once
intimately familiar--on the ear will revive innumerable memories. She
was at some distance from him, with the trailing draperies of eastern
fabrics falling about her in a rich, unbroken, shadowy cloud of
melting color, through which, here and there, broke threads of gold;
involuntarily he paused on the threshold, looking at her. Some faint,
far-off remembrance stirred in him, but deep down in the closed grave
of his past; some vague, intangible association of forgotten days,
forgotten thoughts, drifted before him as it had drifted before him when
first in the Chambree of his barracks he had beheld Venetia Corona.

She moved forward as her servant announced him; she saw him pause there
like one spell-bound, and thought it the hesitation of one who felt
sensitively his own low grade in life. She came toward him with the
silent, sweeping grace that gave her the carriage of an empress; her
voice fell on his ear with the accent of a woman immeasurably proud,
but too proud not to bend softly and graciously to those who were