like that dainty aristocrate down there--pardieu! It had
been worse for you. I should have screamed, and fainted, and left you to
be killed, while I made a tableau. Oh, ha! that is to be 'feminine,' is
it not?"

"Where did you see that lady?" he asked in some surprise.

"Oh, I was there!" answered Cigarette, with a toss of her head southward
to where the villa lay. "I went to see how you would keep your promise."

"Well, you saw I kept it."

She gave her little teeth a sharp click like the click of a trigger.

"Yes. And I would have forgiven you if you had broken it."

"Would you? I should not have forgiven myself."

"Ah! you are just like the Marquise. And you will end like him."

"Very probably."

She knitted her pretty brows, standing there in his path with her
pistols thrust in her sash, and her hands resting lightly on her hips,
as a good workman rests after a neatly finished job, and her dainty fez
set half on one side of her brown, tangled curls, while upon them the
intense luster of the moonlight streamed, and in the dust, well-nigh at
their feet, lay the gaunt, while-robed form of the dead Arab, with the
olive, saturnine face turned upward to the stars.

"Why did you give the chessmen to that silver pheasant?" she asked him
abruptly.

"Silver pheasant?"

"Yes. See how she sweeps--sweeps--sweeps so languid, so brilliant, so
useless--bah! Why did you give them?"

"She admired them. It was not much to give."

"You would not have given them to a daughter of the people."

"Why not?"

"Why not? Oh, ha! because her hands would be hard, and brown, and
coarse, not fit for those ivory puppets; but hers are white like the
ivory, and cannot soil it. She will handle them so gracefully, for five
minutes; and then buy a new toy, and let her lapdog break yours!"

"Like enough." He said it with his habitual gentle temper, but there was
a shadow of pain in the words. The chessmen had become in some sort like
living things to him, through long association; he had parted from them
not without regret, though for the moment courtesy and generosity of
instinct had overcome it; and he knew that it was but too true how in
all likelihood these trifles of his art, that had brought him many
a solace and been his companion through many a lonely hour, would be
forgotten by the morrow, where he had bestowed them, and at best put
aside in a cabinet to lie unnoticed among bronzes or porcelain, or be
set on some boudoir ta