The door was closed and Stuart was alone in the quarters reserved for the chief. It had not yet been invaded by the filthy plundering gangs without, and its order and military neatness and decorum affected his quivering nerves as a sort of solace--as of a recurrence of the sane atmosphere of right reason after a period of turbulent mania. And suddenly his heart was all pierced by grief and a sense of bereavement. He had realized his friend was dead, and he felt that this might fairly be considered the better fate. But somehow the trivial personal belongings so bespoke the vanished presence that he yearned for Demeré in his happy release; the shaken nerves could respond to the echo of a voice forever silenced; he could look into vacancy upon a face he was destined to see never again. His jaded faculties, instead of reaching forward to the terrible future, began to turn back vaguely to the details of their long service together; as a reflex of the agitation he had endured he could not, in the surcease of turmoil, compass a quiet mind; he began to experience that poignant anguish of bereavement, self-reproach. He remembered trifling differences they had had in the life they lived here like brothers, and his own part in them gnawed in his consciousness like a grief; he repented him of words long ago forgiven; he thought of personal vexations that he might have sought to smooth away but carelessly left in disregard; and when he lay down in the darkness on the narrow camp-bed with his friend's pillow under his head, Demeré's look this morning, of affectionate banter, with which he had turned on the ground as they lay in the bivouac was so present to his mind that the tears which all his pains and griefs were powerless to summon, sprang to his eyes.