d
impossible to execute. The purity and the dignity of her opponent's
presence had their irresistible influence, an influence too strong for
even her debonair and dangerous insolence. She hated herself in that
moment more than she hated her rival.

Venetia laid the loaded pistol down, away from both, and seated herself
on the cushions from which she had risen. Then she looked once more,
long and quietly, at her unknown antagonist.

"Well?" she said, at length. "Why do you venture to come here? And why
do you feel this malignity toward a stranger who never saw you until
this morning?"

Under the challenge the fiery spirit of Cigarette rallied, though a rare
and galling sense of intense inferiority, of intense mortification, was
upon her; though she would almost have given the Cross which was on her
breast that she had never come into this woman's sight.

"Oh, ah!" she answered recklessly, with the red blood flushing her face
again at the only evasion of truth of which the little desperado, with
all her sins, had ever been guilty. "I hate you, Milady, because of
your Order--because of your nation--because of your fine, dainty
ways--because of your aristocrat's insolence--because you treat my
soldiers like paupers--because you are one of those who do no more to
have the right to live than the purple butterfly that flies in the sun,
and who oust the people out of their dues as the cuckoo kicks the poor
birds that have reared it, out of the nest of down, to which it never
has carried a twig or a moss!"

Her listener heard with a slight smile of amusement and of surprise that
bitterly discomfited the speaker. To Venetia Corona the girl-soldier
seemed mad; but it was a madness that interested her, and she knew at a
glance that this child of the army was of no common nature and no common
mind.

"I do not wish to discuss democracy with you," she answered, with a tone
that sounded strangely tranquil to Cigarette after the scathing acrimony
of her own. "I should probably convince you as little as you would
convince me; and I never waste words. But I heard you to-day claim a
certain virtue--justice. How do you reconcile with that your very hasty
condemnation of a stranger of whose motives, actions, and modes of life
it is impossible you can have any accurate knowledge?"

Cigarette once again was silenced; her face burned, her heart was
hot with rage. She had come prepared to upbraid and to outrage this
patrician with every