They had suffered much, and much endured together; their very dissimilarities had seemed to draw them nearer to each other.

The gentle impassiveness of the Englishman had been like rest to the ardent impetuosity of the French soldier; the passionate and poetic temperament of the artist-trooper had revealed to Cecil a thousand views of thought and of feeling which had never before then dawned on him.

And now that the one lay dead, a heavy, weary sense of loneliness rested on the other.

They died around him every day; the fearless, fiery blood of France watered in ceaseless streams the arid, harvestless fields of northern Africa.

Death was so common that the fall of a comrade was no more noted by them than the fall of a loose stone that their horse's foot shook down a precipice.