hty, stag-like carriage and the crown of its golden
hair.

Cigarette had seen grand dames by the thousand, though never very close;
seen them in Paris when they came to look on at a grand review; seen
them in their court attire, when the Guides had filled the Carrousel
on some palace ball-night, and lined the Court des Princes, and she had
bewitched the officers of the guard into letting her pass in to see the
pageantry. But she had never felt for those grandes dames anything save
a considerably contemptuous indifference. She had looked on them pretty
much as a war-worn, powder-tried veteran looks on the curled dandy
of some fashionable, home-staying corps. She had never realized the
difference betwixt them and herself, save in so far as she thought
them useless butterflies, worth nothing at all, and laughed as she
triumphantly remembered how she could shoot a man and break in a colt.

Now, for the first time, the sight of one of those aristocrats smote
her with a keen, hot sting of heart-burning jealousy. Now, for the fist
time, the little Friend of the Flag looked at all the nameless graces
of rank with an envy that her sunny, gladsome, generous nature had never
before been touched with--with a sudden perception, quick as thought,
bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what this
womanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might be in its
highest and purest shape.

"If those are the women that he knew before he came here, I do not
wonder that he never cared to watch even my bamboula," was the
latent, unacknowledged thought that was so cruel to her: the
consciousness--which forced itself in on her, while her eyes jealously
followed the perfect grace of the one in whom instinct had found her
rival--that, while she had been so proud of her recklessness, and her
devilry, and her trooper's slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she
had only been something very worthless, something very lightly held by
those who liked her for a ribald jest, and a dance, and a Spahis' supper
of headlong riot and drunken mirth.

The mood did not last. She was too brave, too fiery, too dauntless,
too untamed. The dusky, angry flush upon her face grew deeper, and the
passion gathered more stormily in her eyes, while she felt the pistol
butts in her sash, and laughed low to herself, where she lay stretched
under her flowery nest.

"Bah! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of these," she
thought, with her old