them; since he declines money, you will tell me what form that had
better take to be of real and welcome service to a Chasseur d'Afrique."

Chateauroy, more incensed than he chose or dared to show, bowed
courteously, but with a grim, ironic smile.

"If you really insist, give him a Napoleon or two whenever you see him;
he will be very happy to take it and spend it au cabaret, though he
played the aristocrat to-day. But you are too good to him, he is one of
the very worst of my pratiques; and you are as cruel to me in refusing
to deign to accept my trooper's worthless bagatelles at my hands."

She bent her superb head silently, whether in acquiescence or rejection
he could not well resolve with himself, and turned to the staff
officers, among them the heir of a princely semi-royal French House, who
surrounded her, and sorely begrudged the moments she had given to those
miniature carvings and the private soldier who had wrought them. She was
no coquette; she was of too imperial a nature, had too lofty a pride,
and was too difficult to charm or to enchain; but those meditative,
brilliant, serene eyes had a terrible gift of awakening without ever
seeking love, and of drawing without ever recompensing homage.

Crouched down among her rose-hued covert, Cigarette had watched and
heard; her teeth set tightly, her breath coming and going swiftly, her
hand clinched close on the butts of her pistols; fiery curses, with all
the infinite variety in cursing of a barrack repertoire, chasing one
another in hot, fast mutterings of those bright lips, that should have
known nothing except a child's careless and innocent song.

She had never looked at a beautiful, high-born woman before, holding
them in gay, satirical disdain as mere butterflies who could not prime
a revolver and fire it off to save their own lives, if ever such need
arose. But now she studied one through all the fine, quickened, unerring
instincts of jealousy; and there is no instinct in the world that gives
such thorough appreciation of the very rival it reviles. She saw the
courtly negligence, the regal grace, the fair, brilliant loveliness, the
delicious, serene languor, of a pure aristocrate for the very first time
to note them, and they made her heart sick with a new and deadly sense;
they moved her much as the white, delicate carvings of the lotus-lilies
had done; they, like the carvings, showed her all she had missed. She
dropped her head suddenly like a wound