ossed weed.

That horrible story came to the memory of Cigarette now as it had been
told her by the old soldier who, in his boyhood, had seen the entry of
the Marseillais to Paris. She knew what the woman of the people had felt
when she had bruised and mocked and thrown out to the devouring waters
that fair and fallen head.

"I could do it--I could do it," she thought, with the savage instinct of
her many-sided nature dominant, leaving uppermost only its ferocity--the
same ferocity as had moved the southern woman to wreak her hatred on the
senseless head of her rival. The school in which the child-soldier had
been reared had been one to foster all those barbaric impulses; to leave
in their inborn, uncontrolled force all those native desires which the
human shares with the animal nature. There had been no more to teach her
that these were criminal or forbidden than there is to teach the young
tigress that it is cruel to tear the antelope for food. What Cigarette
was, that nature had made her; she was no more trained to self-control,
or to the knowledge of good, than is the tiger's cub as it wantons in
its play under the great, broad tropic leaves.

Now, she acted on her impulse; her impulse of open scorn of rank, of
reckless vindication of her right to do just whatsoever pleasured her;
and she went boldly forward and dashed aside, with no gentle hand, the
folds that hung before the entrance of the tent, and stood there with
the gleam of the starry night and the glow of the torches behind her,
so that her picturesque and brightly colored form looked painted on a
dusky, lurid background of shadow and of flame.

The action startled the occupants of the tent, and made them both look
up; they were Venetia Corona and a Levantine woman, who was her favorite
and most devoted attendant, and had been about her from her birth. The
tent was the first of three set aside for her occupancy, and had been
adorned with as much luxury as was procurable, and with many of the rich
and curious things of Algerian art and workmanship, so far as they
could be hastily collected by the skill and quickness of the French
intendance. Cigarette stood silently looking at the scene on which she
had thus broken without leave or question; she saw nothing of it except
one head lifted in surprise at her entrance--just such a head, just so
proudly carried, just so crowned with gleaming hair as that which the
Marseillaise had dragged through the dust of th