iliar comrades,
were now as strangers to each other; the one slumbered in ignorance near
her, the other had gone out to the close peril of death, lest the eyes
of his friend recognize his face and read his secret. It troubled her,
it weighed on her, it smote her with a pang. It might be that now, even
now--this very moment, while her gaze watched the dusky shadows of
the night chase one another along the dreary plains--a shot might
have struck down this life that had been stripped of name and fame and
country; even now all might be over!

And Cigarette felt a cold, sickly shudder seize her that never before,
at death or danger, had chilled the warm, swift current of her bright
French blood. In bitter scorn at herself, she muttered hot oaths between
her pretty teeth.

Mere de Dieu! he had touched her lips as carelessly as her own
kiss would have touched the rose-bud, waxen petals of a cluster of
oleander-blossoms; and she cared for him still!

While the Seraph slept dreamlessly, with the tents of the French camp
around him, and the sleepless eyes of Cigarette watched afar off the
dim, distant forms of the vedettes as they circled slowly round at their
outpost duty--eight leagues off, through a vast desert of shadow and
silence, the two horsemen swept swiftly on. Not a word had passed
between them; they rode close together in unbroken stillness; they were
scarcely visible to each other for there was no moon, and storm-clouds
obscured the skies. Now and then their horses' hoofs struck fire from a
flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the darkness; often not even
the sound of their gallop was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil.

Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril. No frowning ledge of
rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might serve as the barricade
behind which some foe lurked; no knot of cypress-shrubs, black even on
that black sheet of shadow, but might be pierced with the steel tubes of
leveled, waiting muskets.

Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what was to them
a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the invader, the predatory
tribes had broken out into a revolt which the rout of Zaraila, heavy
blow though it had been to them, had by no means ended. They were still
in arms, infesting the country everywhere southward; defying regular
pursuit, impervious to regular attacks; carrying on the harassing
guerilla warfare at which they were such adepts. And causing