Waterbury Democrat., 1901-05-20
UNDER TWO FLAGS
By "OUIDA."

sShe Is the most beautiful or thy many fair Frankish women. I never saw her till today. She seemed to have m interest in thee, my son. But listen here. Touching these ivory toys, if thou lost not bring henceforth to me all the work in them that thou doest thou shalt never come here more to meet the light of her eyes"
 Cecil smiled and pressed the Mos Iem's hand.
 q kept them away because you would have given me O hundred piasters for what had not been worth one. AS for her eyes, they are stars that shine on another world than an African troop er's. So bestw
 Yet they were the stars of which he thought more, as he wended his way back to the barracks, than ofs the splen- did constellations of the Algerian even ing. Meantime the Princess Corona drove homeward-homeward to where a temporary home had been made by her in the most elegant of the many snow white villas that stud the sides of the Sahel and face the bright bow of the sunlit bay. She passed from her carriage to her own morning room and sank down on a couch little listless and weary with her search among the treasures of the Algerian bazaars.
 Not one of those things do want not one shall I look at twice. The money would have been better at the soldiers hospital" she thought, while her eyes dwelt on chess table near her-a table on which the mimic hosts of chasseurs and Arabs were ranged in opposite squadrons. She took the white king in her hand and gazed at 1t with certain interest.
 "That man has been noble once," she thought. What a fateI What a cruel fatel How bitter his life must bel When Philip comes, perhaps he will know some way to aid him. And yet-who can serve a man who only desires to be forgotten?"
 Then, with certain impatient sense of some absurd discrepancy, of some unseemly occupation, in her thus dwell ing on the wishes and the burdens of a corporal of light cavalry. she laughed little and put the white king back once more in his place. Yet even as she set the king among his mimic forces the very carvings themselves served to re- tain their artist in her memory.
 There was about them an indescrib- able elegance, an exceeding grace and beauty, which spoke of knowledge of art and of refinement of taste far be- yond those of a mere military amateur in the one who produced them.
 "What could bring a man of that tal- ent, with that address, into the ranks" she unused. Persons of good family, of once fine position, come here, they say, and live and die unrecognized un- der the imperial flag. It is usually some dishonor that drives them out of their own worlds. It may be So with him. Yet he does not look like one whom shame has touched. He is proud stilI-prouder than he knows. More likely it is the old, old story-a high name and narrow fortune, the ruin of thousands. Well, it is no matter of mine. Very possibly he is mere ad venturer with a good manner. This army here is a mixture, they say, of all the varied scoundrelisms of Flu rope"
 The Moslem had said alright of her beauty. Many besides the old Moslem had thought it "the fairest that e'er the sun shone on'' and held one grave, lustrous glance. of the blue imperial eyes above aught else on earth. Many had loved her, all without return. Yet, although only 20 years had passed over her proud head, the Princess Corona d'Amague had been welded and been widowed.
 Welded, with no other sentiment than that of certain pity and a cer- tain honor for the man whose noble Spanish name she took; widowed by death that was the seal of her mar riage sacrament and left her his wife only. in name and law.
 Tie marriage had left no chain upon her; it had only made her mistress of wide wealth, of that villa on the Sicil- ian sea, of that light, spacious palace dwelling in Paris that bore her name, of that majestic old castle throned on brown Estremaduran crags. The death had left no regret upon her; it only gave her for awhile a graver shadow over the brilliancy of her youth and of her beauty and gave her a plea for that in- ulueTGuCe tO Ilpu $ W0rSQlp or her which their sex called heartlessness, which her own sex thought an ultra refined coquetry and which was in real truth neither the one nor the other, but simply the negligence of woman very difficult to touch and, as it had seemed. impossible to chaHn. It was not ambition that had allied her on his deathbed with Beltran Corona d'Ama- que, but what it was the world could never tell precisely. The world would not have believed it if it had heard the truth-the truth that it had been, in different fashion. gleam of something of the same compassion that now made her merciful to q common trooper or Africa which had welded her to the dead Spanish prince. Corona d'Amague had been her brothers friend, the only one for whom he had ever sought to break her unvarying indifference to her lovers, but for whom even he had pleaded vainly until one autumn sea- son when they had staid together at great archducal castle in south Aus | tria. In one of the forest glades she rejected for the third time the passion ate application of the superb noble.