e
luncheon-table of a Russian Prince who was touring through Algiers, and
who had half lost his Grand Ducal head after the bewitching, dauntless,
capricious, unattachable, unpurchasable, and coquettish little
fire-eater of the Spahis, who treated him with infinitely more insolence
and indifference than she would show to some battered old veteran, or
some worn-out old dog, who had passed through the great Kabaila raids
and battles.

"You will go to your Colonel's to-night?" she said questioningly, as he
drank the champagne, and thanked her--for he saw the spirit in which the
gift was tendered--as he leaned against the half-ruined Moorish wall,
with its blue-and-white striped awning spread over both their heads in
the little street whose crowds, chatter, thousand eyes, and incessant
traffic no way troubled Cigarette; who had talked argot to monarchs
undaunted, and who had been one of the chief sights in a hundred grand
reviews ever since she had been perched on a gun-carriage at five years
old, and paraded with a troop of horse artillery in the Champ de Mars,
as having gone through the whole of Bugeaud's campaign, at which parade,
by the way, being tendered sweetmeats by a famous General's wife,
Cigarette had made the immortal reply: "Madame, my sweetmeats are
bullets!"

She repeated her question imperiously, as Cecil kept silent. "You will
go to-night?"

He shrugged his shoulders. He did not care to discuss his Colonel's
orders with this pretty little Bacchante.

"Oh, a chief's command, you know--"

"Ah, a fig for a chief!" retorted Cigarette impatiently. "Why don't you
say the truth? You are thinking you will disobey, and risk the rest!"

"Well, why not? I grant his right in barrack and field, but----"

He spoke rather to himself than her, and his thoughts, as he spoke, went
back to the scene of the morning. He felt, with a romantic impulse that
he smiled at, even as it passed over him, that he would rather have half
a dozen muskets fired at him in the death-sentence of a mutineer than
meet again the glance of those proud, azure eyes, sweeping over him in
their calm indifference to a private of Chasseurs, their calm ignorance
that he could be wounded or be stung.

"But?" echoed Cigarette, leaning out of her oval hole, perched in the
quaint, gray Moresco wall, parti-colored with broken encaustics of
varied hues. "Chut, bon comrade! That little word has been the undoing
of the world ever since the world began. '