garette tossed back her pretty head that was curly and spirited and
shapely as any thoroughbred spaniel's; a superb glance flashed from her
eyes, a superb disdain sat on her lips.

"You are a Jew trader; you know nothing of our code under the tricolor.
We are too proud not to aid even an enemy when he is in the right, and
France always arms for justice!"

With which magnificent peroration she swept all the carvings--they were
rightfully hers--off the table.

"They will light my cooking fire!" she said contemptuously, as she
vaulted lightly over the counter into the street, and pirouetted along
the slope of the crowded Babazoum. All made way for her, even the mighty
Spahis and the trudging Bedouin mules, for all knew that if they did
not she would make it for herself, over their heads or above their
prostrated bodies. Finally she whirled herself into a dark, deserted
Moresco archway, a little out of the town, and dropped on a stone block,
as a swallow, tired of flight, drops on to a bough.

"Is that the way I revenge myself? Ah, bah! I deserve to be killed! When
he called me unsexed--unsexed--unsexed!"--and with each repetition of
the infamous word, so bitter because vaguely admitted to be true, with
her cheeks scarlet and her eyes aflame, and her hands clinched, she
flung one of the ivory wreathes on to the pavement and stamped on it
with her spurred heel until the carvings were ground into powdered
fragments--stamped, as though it were a living foe, and her steel-bound
foot were treading out all its life with burning hate and pitiless
venom.

In the act her passion exhausted itself, as the evil of such warm,
impetuous, tender natures will; she was very still, and looked at the
ruin she had done with regret and a touch of contrition.

"It was very pretty--and cost him weeks of labor, perhaps," she thought.

Then she took all the rest up, one by one, and gazed at them. Things
of beauty had had but little place in her lawless young life; what she
thought beautiful was a regiment sweeping out in full sunlight, with its
eagles, and its colors, and its kettle-drums; what she held as music
was the beat of the reveille and the mighty roll of the great artillery;
what made her pulse throb and her heart leap was to see two fine
opposing forces draw near for the onslaught and thunder of battle. Of
things of grace she had no heed, though she had so much grace herself;
and her life, though full of color, pleasure, and mischi