I. "Are you detailed
to look after me?"

He said he was, and I informed him that I needed nobody; that it was
much more important for everybody that he should rejoin his battalion
in the street below, where even now I could hear the Algerian bugles
blowing a silvery sonnerie--"Garde a vous!"

"I am Salah Ben-Ahmed, a marabout of the Third Turcos," he said,
proudly, "and I have yet to explain to these Prussians who my seven
ancestors were. Have I my inspector's permission to go?"

He was fairly trembling as the imperative clangor of the bugles rang
through the street; his fine nostrils quivered, his eyes glittered
like a cobra's.

"Go, Salah Ben-Ahmed, the marabout," said I, laughing.

The soldier stiffened to attention; his bronzed hand flew to his
scarlet fez, and, "Salute! O my inspector!" he cried, sonorously, and
was gone at a bound.

That breathless unrest which always seizes me when men are at one
another's throats set me wriggling and twitching, and peering from the
window, through which I could not see because of the blinds. Command
after command was ringing out in the street below. "Forward!" shouted
a resonant voice, and "Forward! forward! forward!" echoed the voices
of the captains, distant and more distant, then drowned in the rolling
of kettle-drums and the silvery clang of Moorish cymbals.

The band music of the Algerian infantry died away in the distant
tumult of the guns; faintly, at moments, I could still hear the shrill
whistle of their flutes, the tinkle of the silver chimes on their
_toug_; then a blank, filled with the hollow roar of battle, then a
clear note from their reeds, a tinkle, an echoing chime--and nothing,
save the immense monotone of the cannonade.

I had been lying there motionless for an hour, my head on my hand,
snivelling, when there came a knock at the door, and I hastily
buttoned my blood-stained shirt to the throat, threw a tunic over my
shoulders, and cried, "Come in!"

A trick of memory and perhaps of physical weakness had driven from my
mind all recollection of the Countess de Vassart since I had come to
my senses under the surgeon's probe. But at the touch of her fingers
on the door outside, I knew her--I was certain that it could be nobody
but my Countess, who had turned aside in her gentle pilgrimage to lift
this Lazarus from the waysides of a hostile world.

She entered noiselessly, bearing a bowl of broth and some bread; but
when she saw me sitting there with