ttle as he said it, and traced more figures
slowly in the sand.

"Ah!"

She drew a short, quick breath. She understood that; she would only have
laughed at him had it been a woman; Cigarette was more veracious than
complimentary in her estimate of her own sex.

"There was a man in the Cuirassiers I knew," she went on softly,
"loved a horse like that;--he would have died for Cossack--but he was
a terrible gambler, terrible. Not but what I like to play myself. Well,
one day he played and played till he was mad, and everything was gone;
and then in his rage he staked the only thing he had left. Staked and
lost the horse! He never said a word; but he just slipped a pistol in
his pocket, went to the stable, kissed Cossack once--twice--thrice--and
shot himself through the heart."

"Poor fellow!" murmured the Chasseur d'Afrique, in his chestnut beard.

Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her falcon eyes; "he
had gambled away a good deal too," she thought. "It is always the same
old story with them."

"Your cigars are good, mon lion," she said impatiently, as she sprang
up; her lithe, elastic figure in the bright vivandiere uniform standing
out in full relief against the pearly gray of the ruined pillars, the
vivid green of the rank vegetation, and the intense light of the noon.
"Your cigars are good, but it is more than your company is! If you had
been as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a single turn
with you in the cancan!"

And with a bound to which indignation lent wings like a swallow's, the
Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the apathy with which her
advances to friendship had been received, dashed off at her topmost
speed, singing all the louder out of bravado. "To have nothing more
to say to me after dancing with me all night!" thought Cigarette, with
fierce wrath at such contumely, the first neglect the pet of the Spahis
had ever experienced.

She was incensed, too, that she had been degraded into that momentary
wish that she knew how to read and looked less like a boy--just because
a Chasseur with white hands and silent ways had made her a grave bow!
She was more incensed still because she could not get at his history,
and felt, despite herself, a reluctance to bribe him for it with those
cajoleries whose potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux. "Let him take
care!" muttered the soldier-coquette passionately, in her little white
teeth; so small and so pearly, though th