le with the keen, rapid perceptions of
envy and of jealousy; studying her features, her form, her dress,
her attitude, all the many various and intangible marks of birth and
breeding which were so new to her, and which made her rival seem so
strange, so dazzling, so marvelous a sorceress to her; and all the
while the sense of her own inferiority, her own worthlessness, her own
boldness, her own debasement was growing upon her, eating, sharply into
the metal of her vanity and her pride, humiliating her unbearably, yet
making her heart ache with a sad, pathetic pity for herself.

"He is of your Order, then?" she asked abruptly.

"He was--yes."

"Oh, ha!" cried Cigarette, with her old irony. "Then he must be always,
mustn't he? You think too much of your blue blood, you patricians, to
fancy it can lose its royalty, whether it run under a King's purple or a
Roumi's canvas shirt. Blood tells, they say! Well, perhaps it does. Some
say my father was a Prince of France--maybe! So, he is of your Order?
Bah! I knew that the first day I saw his hands. Do you want me to tell
you why he lives among us, buried like this?"

"Not if you violate any confidence to do so."

"Pardieu! He makes no confidence, I promise you. Not ten words will
Monsieur say, if he can help it, about anything. He is as silent as a
lama. But we learn things without being told in camp; and I know well
enough he is here to save someone else, in someone's place; it is a
sacrifice, look you, that nails him down to this martyrdom."

Her auditor was silent; she thought as the vivandiere thought, but the
pride in her, the natural reticence and reserve of her class, made her
shrink from discussing the history of one whom she knew--shrink from
having any argument on his past or future with a saucy, rough, fiery
young camp-follower, who had broken thus unceremoniously on her privacy.
Yet she needed greatly to be able to trust Cigarette; the child was the
only means through which she could send him a warning that must be
sent; and there were a bravery and a truth in her which attracted the
"aristocrat," to whom she was so singular and novel a rarity as though
she were some young savage of desert western isles.

"Look you, Milady," said Cigarette, half sullenly, half passionately,
for the words were wrenched out of her generosity, and choked her
in their utterance, "that man suffers; his life here is a hell upon
earth--I don't mean for the danger, he is bon soldat;