Old instinct, long habit, made him start and shake his harness together and listen.

The trumpet-blast, winding cheerily from afar off, recalled him to the truth; summoned him sharply back from vain regrets to the facts of daily life.

It waked him as it wakes a sleeping charger; it roused him as it rouses a wounded trooper.
He stood hearkening to the familiar music till it had died away--spirited, yet still lingering; full of fire, yet fading softly down the wind.

He listened till the last echo ceased; then he tore the paper that he held in strips, and let it float away, drifting down the yellow current of the reedy river channel; and he half drew from its scabbard the saber whose blade had been notched and dented and stained in many midnight skirmishes and many headlong charges under the desert suns, and looked at it as though a friend's eye gazed at him in the gleam of the trusty steel.

And his soldier-like philosophy, his campaigner's carelessness, his habitual, easy negligence that had sometimes been weak as water and sometimes heroic as martyrdom, came back to him with a deeper shadow on it, that was grave with a calm, resolute, silent courage.
"So best after all, perhaps," he said half aloud, in the solitude of the ruined and abandoned mosque.