-faire-peur" was not a fair field or a smooth course
with his Colonel. The weather-cock heart of the little "Friend of the
Flag" veered round, with her sex's common custom, to the side that was
the weakest.

"Dieu de Dieu, M. le Colonel!" she cried, while she ate M. le Colonel's
foie gras with as little ceremony and as much enjoyment as would be
expected from a young plunderer accustomed to think a meal all the
better spiced by being stolen "by the rules of war"--"whatever else
your handsome Corporal is, he is an aristocrat. Ah, ha! I know the
aristocrats--I do! Their touch is so gentle, and their speech is
so soft, and they have no slang of the camp, and yet they are such
diablotins to fight and eat steel, and die laughing, all so quiet and
nonchalant. Give me the aristocrats--the real thing, you know. Not the
ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are ashamed of being honest bread--but the
old blood like Bel-a-faire-peur."

The Colonel laughed, but restlessly; the little ingrate had aimed at a
sore point in him. He was of the First Empire Nobility, and he was
weak enough, though a fierce, dauntless iron-nerved soldier, to be
discontented with the great fact that his father had been a hero of
the Army of Italy, and scarce inferior in genius to Massena, because
impatient of the minor one that, before strapping on a knapsack to
have his first taste of war under Custine, the Marshal had been but a
postilion at a posting inn in the heart of the Nivernais.

"Ah, my brunette!" he answered with a rough laugh, "have you taken
my popular Corporal for your lover? You should give your old friends
warning first, or he may chance to get an ugly spit on a saber."

The Amie du Drapeau tossed off her sixth glass of champagne. She felt
for the first time in her life a flush of hot blood on her brown, clear
cheek, well used as she was to such jests and such lovers as these.

"Ma foi!" she said coolly. "He would be more likely to spit than be
spitted if it came to a duel. I should like to see him in a duel; there
is not a prettier sight in the world when both men have science. As for
fighting for me! Morbleau! I will thank nobody to have the impudence to
do it, unless I order them out. Coqueline got shot for me, you remember;
he was a pretty fellow, Coqueline, and they killed him so clumsily, that
they disfigured him terribly--it was quite a pity. I said then I would
have no more handsome men fight about me. You may, if you like, M. le
Black