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 so far beneath her that, without such aid from her, they could never have addressed or have approached her. “You have come, I trust, to withdraw your prohibition? Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to bring his Majesty's notice to one of the best soldiers his Army holds.” There was that in the words, gently as they were spoken, that recalled him suddenly to himself; they had that negligent, courteous pity she would have shown to some colon begging at her gates! He forgot--forgot utterly--that he was only an African trooper. He only remembered that he had once been a gentleman, that--if a life of honor and of self-negation can make any so--he was one still. He advanced and bowed with the old serene elegance that his bow had once been famed for; and she, well used to be even overcritical in such trifles, thought, “That man has once lived in courts!” “Pardon me, madame, I do not come to trespass so far upon your benignity,” he answered, as he bent before her. “I come to express, rather, my regret that you should have made one single error.” “Error!”--a haughty surprise glanced from her eyes as they swept over him. Such a word had never been used to her in the whole course of her brilliant and pampered life of sovereignty and indulgence.