ng it away with her slang jests, and
her Theresa songs, and her devil-may-care audacities, till there was
scarce a trace of it left in this prettiest and wildest little scamp
of all the Army in Africa. But strive to kill it how she would, her sex
would have its revenge one day and play Nemesis to her.

She was bewitching now--bewitching, though she had no witchery for
him--in her youth. But when the bloom should leave her brown cheeks,
and the laughter die out of her lightning glance, the womanhood she had
denied would assert itself, and avenge itself, and be hideous in the
sight of the men who now loved the tinkling of those little spurred
feet, and shouted with applause to hear the reckless barrack blasphemies
ring their mirth from the fresh mouth which was now like a bud from
a damask rose branch, though even now it steeped itself in wine, and
sullied itself with oaths and seared itself with smoke, and had never
been touched from its infancy with any kiss that was innocent--not even
with its mother's.

And there was a deep tinge of pity for her in Cecil's thoughts as he
watched her out of sight, and then strolled across to the cafe opposite
to finish his cigar beneath its orange-striped awning. The child had
been flung upward, a little straw floating in the gutter of Paris
iniquities. It was little marvel that the bright, bold, insolent little
Friend of the Flag had nothing of her sex left save a kitten's mischief
and a coquette's archness. It said much rather for the straight, fair,
sunlit instincts of the untaught nature that Cigarette had gleaned,
even out of such a life, two virtues that she would have held by to the
death, if tried: a truthfulness that would have scorned a lie as only
fit for cowards, and a loyalty that cleaved to France as a religion.

Cecil thought that a gallant boy was spoiled in this eighteen-year-old
brunette of a campaigner; he might have gone further, and said that a
hero was lost.

"Voila!" said Cigarette between her little teeth.

She stood in the glittering Algerine night, brilliant with a million
stars, and balmy with a million flowers, before the bronze trellised
gate of the villa on the Sahel, where Chateauroy, when he was not on
active service--which chanced rarely, for he was one of the finest
soldiers and most daring chiefs in Africa--indemnified himself, with
the magnificence that his private fortune enabled him to enjoy, for
the unsparing exertions and the rugged privatio