ed bird, and the racy, vindictive
camp oaths died off her lips. She thought of herself as she had danced
that mad bacchic bamboula amid the crowd of shouting, stamping, drunken,
half-infuriated soldiery; and for the moment she hated herself more even
than she hated that patrician yonder.

"I know what he meant now!" she pondered, and her spirited, sparkling,
brunette face was dark and weary, like a brown, sun-lightened brook
over whose radiance the heavy shadow of some broad-spread eagle's wings
hovers, hiding the sun.

She looked once, twice, thrice, more inquiringly, envyingly, thirstily;
then, as the band under the cedars rolled out their music afresh, and
light laughter echoed to her from the terrace, she turned and
wound herself back under the cover of the shrubs; not joyously and
mischievously as she had come, but almost as slowly, almost as sadly, as
a hare that the greyhounds have coursed drags itself through the grasses
and ferns.

Once through the cactus hedge her old spirit returned; she shook herself
angrily with petulant self-scorn; she swore a little, and felt that the
fierce, familiar words did her good like brandy poured down her throat;
she tossed her head like a colt that rebels against the gall of the
curb; then, fleet as a fawn, she dashed down the moonlit road at topmost
speed. "She can't do what I do!" she thought.

And she ran the faster, and sang a drinking-song of the Spahis all the
louder, because still at her heart a dull pain was aching.

CHAPTER XXI.

CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA.

Cigarette always went fast. She had a bird-like way of skimming her
ground that took her over it with wonderful swiftness; all the tassels,
and ribbon knots, and sashes with which her uniform was rendered so gay
and so distinctive fluttering behind her; and her little military boots,
with the bright spurs twinkling, flying over the earth too lightly for
a speck of dust,--though it lay thick as August suns could parch it,--to
rest upon her. Thus she went now, along the lovely moonlight; singing
her drinking song so fast and so loud that, had it been any other than
this young fire-eater of the African squadrons, it might have been
supposed she sang out of fear and bravado--two things, however, that
never touched Cigarette; for she exulted in danger as friskily as a
young salmon exults in the first, crisp, tumbling crest of a sea-wave,
and would have backed up the most vainglorious word she could have
spoken