disdain, "and would stand fire no more than
a gazelle! They are only made for summer-day weather, those dainty,
gorgeous, silver pheasants. A breath of war, a touch of tempest, would
soon beat them down--crash!--with all their proud crests drooping!"

Like many another Cigarette underrated what she had no knowledge of, and
depreciated an antagonist the measure of whose fence she had no power to
gauge.

Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still as a mouse,
moving nearer and nearer, though none would have told that so much as
a lizard even stirred under the blossoms, until her ear, quick and
unerring as an Indian's, could detect the sense of the words spoken by
that group, which so aroused all the hot ire of her warrior's soul and
her democrat's impatience. Chateauroy himself was bending his fine, dark
head toward the patrician on whom her instinct had fastened her hatred.

"You expressed your wish to see my Corporal's little sculptures again,
madame," he was murmuring now, as Cigarette got close enough under her
flower shadows to catch the sense of the words. "To hear was to obey
with me. He waits your commands yonder."

Cecil obeyed the lackey who crossed the lawn, passed up the stairs, and
stood before his Colonel, giving the salute; the shade of some acacias
still fell across him, while the party he fronted were in all the glow
of a full Algerian moon and of the thousand lamps among the belt of
flowers and trees. Cigarette gave a sharp, deep-drawn breath, and lay
as mute and motionless as she had done before then, among the rushes
of some dried brook's bed, scanning a hostile camp, when the fate of a
handful of French troops had rested on her surety and her caution.

Chateauroy spoke with a carelessness as of a man to a dog, turning to
his Corporal.

"Victor, Mme. la Princesse honors you with the desire to see your toys
again. Spread them out."

The savage authority of his general speech was softened for sake of his
guest's presence, but there was a covert tone in the words that made
Cigarette murmur to herself:

"If he forget his promise, I will forgive him!"

Cecil had not forgotten it; neither had he forgotten the lesson that
this fair aristocrate had read him in the morning. He saluted his chief
again, set the chessbox down upon the ledge of the marble balustrade,
and stood silent, without once glancing at the fair and haughty face
that was more brilliant still in the African starlight tha