d the greatness of Greece could find as issue to
the terrible jest, the mysterious despair, of all existence.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD.

Some way distant, parted by a broad strip of unoccupied ground from
the camp, were the grand marquees set aside for the Marshal and for
his guests. They were twelve in number, gayly decorated--as far as
decoration could be obtained in the southern provinces of Algeria--and
had, Arab-like, in front of each the standard of the Tricolor. Before
one were two other standards also: the flags of England and of Spain.
Cigarette, looking on from afar, saw the alien colors wave in the
torchlight flickering on them. "That is hers," thought the Little One,
with the mournful and noble emotions of the previous moments swiftly
changing into the violent, reasonless, tumultuous hatred at once of a
rival and of an Order.

Cigarette was a thorough democrat; when she was two years old she had
sat on the topmost pile of a Parisian barricade, with the red bonnet on
her curls, and had clapped her tiny hands for delight when the bullets
flew, and the "Marseillaise" rose above the cannonading; and the spirit
of the musketry and of the "Marseillaise" had together passed into her
and made her what she was. She was a genuine democrat; and nothing
short of the pure isonomy of the Greeks was tolerated in her political
philosophy, though she could not have told what such a word had meant
for her life. She had all the furious prejudices and all the instinctive
truths in her of an uncompromising Rouge; and the sight alone of those
lofty standards, signalizing the place of rest of the "aristocrats,"
while her "children's" lowly tents wore in her sight all the dignity and
all the distinction of the true field, would have aroused her ire at any
time. But now a hate tenfold keener moved her; she had a jealousy of the
one in whose honor those two foreign ensigns floated, that was the most
bitter thing which had ever entered her short and sunny life--a hate
the hotter because tinged with that sickening sense of self-humiliation,
because mingled with that wondering emotion at beholding something so
utterly unlike to all that she had known or dreamed.

She had it in her, could she have had the power, to mercilessly and
brutally destroy this woman's beauty, which was so far above her
reach, as she had once destroyed the ivory wreath; yet, as that of the
snow-white carving had done, so did