leap, over his head,
and over the heads of the people beneath, on to the ledge of the house
opposite, a low-built wine-shop, whose upper story nearly touched
the leaning walls of the old Moorish buildings in which she had been
perched. The crowd in the street below looked up, amazed and aghast, at
that bound from casement to casement as she flew over their heads like
a blue-and-scarlet winged bird of Oran; but they laughed as they saw who
it was.

"It is Cigarette! Ah, ha! the devil, for a certainty, must have been her
father!"

"To be sure!" cried the Friend of the Flag, looking from her elevation;
"he is a very good father, too, and I don't tease him like his sons the
priests! But I have told him to take you the next time you are stripping
a dead body; so look on it--he won't have to wait long."

The discomfited Indigene hustled his way, with many an oath, through the
laughing crowd as best he might; and Cigarette, with an airy pirouette
on the wine-shop's roof that would have done honor to any opera boards,
and was executed as carelessly, twenty feet above earth, as if she had
been a pantomime-dancer all her days, let herself down by the awning,
hand over hand, like a little mouse from the harbor, jumped on to
a forage wagon that was just passing full trot down the street, and
disappeared; standing on the piles of hay, and singing.

Cecil looked after her, with a certain touch of pity for her in him.

"What a gallant boy is spoiled in that little Amazon!" he thought; the
quick flush of her face, the quick withdrawal of her hand, he had not
noticed; she had not much interest for him,--scarcely any indeed,--save
that he saw she was pretty, with a mignonne, mischievous face, that all
the sun-tan of Africa and all the wild life of the Caserne would not
harden or debase. But he was sorry a child so bright and so brave should
be turned into three parts a trooper as she was, should have been tossed
up on the scum and filth of the lowest barrack life, and should
be doomed in a few years' time to become the yellow, battered,
foul-mouthed, vulture-eyed camp-follower that premature old age would
surely render the darling of the tricolor, the pythoness of the As de
Pique.

Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of Sex, dancing it down, drinking
it down, laughing it down, burning it out in tobacco fumes, drowning it
in trembling cascades of wine, trampling it to dust under the cancan by
her little brass-bound boots, mocki