like a lackey--to
take his wares thus like a hawker!

"We are soldiers, not traders--aren't we? You don't like that, M.
Victor? You are no peddler. And you think you would rather risk being
court-martialed and shot than take your ivory toys for the Black Hawk's
talons?"

Cecil looked up in astonishment at the divination and translation of his
thoughts, to encounter the bright, falcon eyes of Cigarette looking
down on him from a little oval casement above, dark as pitch within,
and whose embrasure, with its rim of gray stone coping, set off like a
picture-frame, with a heavy background of unglazed Rembrandt shadow,
the piquant head of the Friend of the Flag, with her pouting, scarlet,
mocking lips, and her mischievous, challenging smile, and her dainty
little gold-banded foraging-cap set on curls as silken and jetty as any
black Irish setter's.

"Bon jour, ma belle!" he answered, with a little weariness; lifting his
fez to her with a certain sense of annoyance that this young bohemian of
the barracks, this child with her slang and her satire, should always be
in his way like a shadow.

"Bon jour, mon brave!" returned Cigarette contemptuously. "We are not
so ceremonious as all that in Algiers! Good fellow, you should be a
chamberlain, not a corporal. What fine manners, mon Dieu!"

She was incensed, piqued, and provoked. She had been ready to forgive
him because he carved so wonderfully, and sold the carvings for his
comrade at the hospital; she was holding out the olive-branch after her
own petulant fashion; and she thought, if he had had any grace in him,
he would have responded with some such florid compliment as those for
which she was accustomed to box the ears of her admirers, and would
have swung himself up to the coping, to touch, or at least try to touch,
those sweet, fresh, crimson lips of hers, that were like a half-opened
damask rose. Modesty is apt to go to the wall in camps, and poor little
Cigarette's notions of the great passion were very simple, rudimentary,
and in no way coy. How should they be? She had tossed about with the
army, like one of the tassels to their standards; blowing whichever way
the breath of war floated her; and had experienced, or thought she had
experienced, as many affairs as the veriest Don Juan among them, though
her heart had never been much concerned in them, but had beaten scarce
a shade quicker, if a lunge in a duel, or a shot from an Indigene, had
pounced off with her her