and fought, and lay in the light of the picket-fires, and swept down
through the hot sandstorms on to the desert foe by his side. Cigarette
stretched out her hand to him--that tiny brown hand, which, small though
it was, had looked so burned and so hard beside the delicate fairy ivory
carvings of his workmanship--stretched it out with a frank, winning,
childlike, soldierlike grace.

"That's right, you are a true soldier!"

He bent over the hand she held to his in the courtesy natural with him
to all her sex, and touched it lightly with his lips.

"Thank you, my little comrade," he said simply, with the graver thought
still on him that her relation and her entreaty had evoked; "you have
given me a lesson that I shall not be quick to forget."

Cigarette was the wildest little baccanal that ever pirouetted for
the delight of half a score of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves and
half-drunk; she was the most reckless coquette that ever made
the roll-call of her lovers range from prince-marshals to plowboy
conscripts; she had flirted as far and wide as the butterfly flirts with
the blossoms it flutters on to through the range of a summer day; she
took kisses, if the giver of them were handsome, as readily as a
child takes sweetmeats at Mardi Gras; and of feminine honor, feminine
scruples, feminine delicacy, knew nothing save by such very dim,
fragmentary instincts as nature still planted in scant growth amid the
rank soil and the pestilent atmosphere of camp-life. Her eyes had never
sunk, her face had never flushed, her heart had never panted for the
boldest or the wildest wooer of them all, from M. de Duc's Lauzunesque
blandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire's or Miou-Miou's rough overtures; she
had the coquetry of her nation with the audacity of a boy. Now only, for
the first time, Cigarette colored hotly at the grave, graceful, distant
salute, so cold and so courteous, which was offered her in lieu of the
rude and boisterous familiarities to which she was accustomed; and drew
her hand away with what was, to the shame of her soldierly hardihood and
her barrack tutelage, very nearly akin to an impulse of shyness.

"Dame! Don't humbug me! I am not a court lady!" she cried hastily,
almost petulantly, to cover the unwonted and unwelcome weakness; while,
to make good the declaration and revindicate her military renown,
she balanced herself lightly on the stone ledge of her oval hole, and
sprang, with a young wildcat's easy, vaulting