But' is a blank cartridge, and
never did anything but miss fire yet. Shoot dead, or don't aim at all,
whichever you like; but never make a false stroke with 'but'! So you
won't obey Chateauroy in this?"

He was silent again. He would not answer falsely, and he did not care to
say his thoughts to her.

"'No,'" pursued Cigarette, translating his silence at her fancy, "you
say to yourself, 'I am an aristocrat--I will not be ordered in this
thing'--you say, 'I am a good soldier; I will not be sent for like a
hawker'--you say, 'I was noble once: I will show my blood at last, if I
die!' Ah!--you say that!"

He laughed a little as he looked up at her.

"Not exactly that, but something as foolish, perhaps. Are you a witch,
my pretty one?"

"Whoever doubted it, except you?"

She looked one, in truth, whom few men could resist, bending to him
out of her owls' nest, with the flash of the sun under the blue awning
brightly catching the sunny brown of her soft cheek and the cherry bloom
of her lips, arched, pouting, and coquette. She set her teeth sharply,
and muttered a hot, heavy sacre, or even something worse, as she saw
that his eyes had not even remained on her, but were thoughtfully
looking down the checkered light and color of the street. She was
passionate, she was vain, she was wayward, she was fierce as a little
velvet leopard, as a handsome, brilliant plumaged hawk; she had all the
faults, as she had all the virtues, of the thorough Celtic race; and,
for the moment, she had in instinct--fiery, ruthless, and full of
hate--to draw the pistol out of her belt, and teach him with a shot,
crash through heart or brain, that girls who were "unsexed" could keep
enough of the woman in them not to be neglected with impunity, and
could lose enough of it to be able to avenge the negligence by a summary
vendetta. But she was a haughty little condottiere, in her fashion. She
would not ask for what was not offered her, nor give a rebuke that might
be traced to mortification. She only set her two rosebud-lips in as
firm a line of wrath and scorn as ever Caesar's or Napoleon's molded
themselves into, and spoke in the curt, imperious, generalissimo fashion
with which Cigarette before now had rallied a demoralized troop, reeling
drunk and mad away from a razzia.

"I am a witch! That is, I can put two and two together, and read men,
though I don't read the alphabet. Well, one reading is a good deal rarer
than the other. So you mean t