stern as his conduct of war, and who usually
recompensed his men for fine service rather with a barrel of brandy to
season their rations than with speeches of military eulogium. But it
failed to give delight to Cigarette. She felt resting upon her the calm
gaze of those brilliant azure eyes; and she felt, as she had done once
in her rhododendron shelter, as though she were some very worthless,
rough, rude, untaught, and coarse little barbarian, who was, at best,
but fit for a soldier's jest and a soldier's riot in the wild license of
the barrack room or the campaigning tent. It was only the eyes of
this woman, whom he loved, which ever had the power to awaken that
humiliation, that impatience of herself, that consciousness of something
lost and irrevocable, which moved her now.

Cigarette was proud with an intense pride of all her fiery liberty from
every feminine trammel, of all her complete immunity from every scruple
and every fastidiousness of her sex. But, for once, within sight of that
noble and haughty beauty, a poignant, cruel, wounding sense of utter
inferiority, of utter debasement, possessed and weighed down her lawless
and indomitable spirit. Some vague, weary feeling that her youth was
fair enough in the sight of men, but that her older years would be very
dark, very terrible, came on her even in this hour of the supreme joy,
the supreme triumph of her life. Even her buoyant and cloudless nature
did not escape that mortal doom which pursues and poisons every ambition
in the very instant of its full fruition.

The doubt, the pain, the self-mistrust were still upon her as she
saluted once again and paced down the ranks of the assembled divisions;
while every lance was carried, every sword lifted, every bayonet
presented to the order as she went; greeted as though she were an
empress, for that cross which glittered on her heart, for that courage
wherewith she had saved the Tricolor.

The great shouts rent the air; the clash of the lowered arms saluted
her; the drums rolled out upon the air; the bands of the regiments of
Africa broke into the fiery rapture of a war-march; the folds of
the battle-torn flags were flung out wider and wider on the breeze.
Gray-bearded men gazed on her with tears of delight upon their grizzled
lashes, and young boys looked at her as the children of France once
gazed upon Jeanne d'Arc, where Cigarette, with the red ribbon on her
breast, road slowly in the noonday light along the li