dry water-course, and alighted just in front
of a Chasseur d'Afrique, who was sitting alone on a broken fragment
of white marble, relic of some Moorish mosque, whose delicate columns,
crowned with wind-sown grasses, rose behind him, against the deep
intense blue of the cloudless sky.

He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing figures in
the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scabbard; yet he had all
the look about him of a brilliant French soldier, of one who, moreover,
had seen hot and stern service. He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so
after the red, brown, and black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for
his skin was naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very
soft--for which M. Tata had growled contemptuously, "a woman's face"--a
long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, as he
leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs' uniform,
with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his
knee, was, as Cigarette's critical eye told her, the figure of a superb
cavalry rider; light, supple, long of limb, wide of chest, with every
sinew and nerve firm-knit as links of steel. She glanced at his hands,
which were very white, despite the sun of Algiers and the labors that
fall to a private of Chasseurs.

"Beau lion!" she thought, "and noble, whatever he is."

But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of the Algerian
regiments; she had known so many of them--those gilded butterflies of
the Chaussee d'Antin, those lordly spendthrifts of the vieille roche,
who had served in the battalions of the demi-cavalry, or the squadrons
of the French Horse, to be thrust, nameless and unhonored, into a
sand-hole hastily dug with bayonets in the hot hush of an African night.

She woke him unceremoniously from his reverie, with a challenge to wine.

"Ah, ha! Tata Leroux says you are English; by the faith, he must be
right, or you would never sit musing there like an owl in the sunlight!
Take a draught of my burgundy; bright as rubies. I never sell bad
wines--not I! I know better than to drink them myself."

He started and rose; and, before he took the little wooden drinking-cup,
bowed to her, raising his cap with a grave, courteous obeisance; a bow
that had used to be noted in throne-rooms for its perfection of grace.

"Ah, ma belle, is it you?" he said wearily. "You do me much honor."

Cigarette gave a little petulant twist to