her temples leaned on her hands
tightly twisted among the dark, silken curls of her boyish hair. Her
face had the same dusky, savage intensity upon it; and she never once
moved from that rigid attitude.

She had the Cross on her heart--the idol of her long desire, the star
to which her longing eyes had looked up ever since her childhood through
the reek of carnage and the smoke of battle; and she would have flung it
away like dross, to have had his lips touch hers once with love.

And she knew herself mad; for the desires and the delights of love die
swiftly, but the knowledge of honor abides always. Love would have made
her youth sweet with an unutterable gladness, to glide from her and
leave her weary, dissatisfied, forsaken. But that Cross, the gift of her
country, the symbol of her heroism, would be with her always, and light
her forever with the honor of which it was the emblem; and if her life
should last until youth passed away, and age came, and with age death,
her hand would wander to it on her dying bed, and she would smile, as
she died, to hear the living watchers murmur: "That life had glory--that
life was lived for France."

She knew this; but she was young; she was a woman-child; she had the
ardor of passionate youth in her veins, she had the desolation of
abandoned youth in her heart. And honor looked so cold beside love!

She rose impetuously; the night was far spent, the camp was very still,
the torches had long died out, and a streak of dawn was visible in the
east. She stood a while, looking very earnestly across the wide, black
city of tents.

"I shall be best away for a time. I grow mad, treacherous, wicked here,"
she thought. "I will go and see Blanc-Bec."

Blanc-Bec was the soldier of the Army of Italy.

In a brief while she had saddled and bridled Etoile-Filante, and ridden
out of the camp without warning or farewell to any; she was as free to
come and to go as though she were a bird on the wing. Thus she went,
knowing nothing of his fate. And with the sunrise went also the woman
whom he loved--in ignorance.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE.

The warm, transparent light of an African autumnal noon shone down
through the white canvas roof of a great tent in the heart of the
encamped divisions at the headquarters of the Army of the South. In
the tent there was a densely packed throng--an immense, close, hushed,
listening crowd, of which every man wore the uniform of