t there! She will value fine words;
I set no count on them. I did no more for you than I have done scores of
times for my Spahis. Ask them how many I have shot with my own hand!"

In another instant she was away like a sirocco; a whirlwind of dust,
that rose in the moonlight, marking her flight as she rode full gallop
to Algiers.

"A kitten with the tigress in her," thought Cecil, as he seated himself
on a broken pile of stone to keep his vigil over the dead Arab. It was
not that he was callous to the generous nature of the little Friend of
the Flag, or that he was insensible either to the courage that beat so
dauntlessly in her pulses, or to the piquant, picturesque grace that
accompanied even her wildest actions; but she had nothing of her sex's
charm for him. He thought of her rather as a young soldier than as a
young girl. She amused him as a wayward, bright, mischievous, audacious
boy might have done; but she had no other interest for him. He had given
her little attention; a waltz, a cigar, a passing jest, were all he
had bestowed on the little lionne of the Spahis corps; and the deepest
sentiment she had ever awakened in him was an involuntary pity--pity for
this flower which blossomed on the polluted field of war, and under the
poison-dropping branches of lawless crime. A flower, bright-hued and
sun-fed, glancing with the dews of youth now, when it had just unclosed,
in all its earliest beauty, but already soiled and tainted by the bed
from which it sprang, and doomed to be swept away with time, scentless
and loveless, down the rapid, noxious current of that broad, black
stream of vice on which it now floated so heedlessly.

Even now his thoughts drifted from her almost before the sound of the
horse's hoofs had died where he sat on a loose pile of stones, with the
lifeless limbs of the Arab at his feet.

"Who was it in my old life that she is like?" he was musing. It was the
deep-blue, dreaming haughty eyes of the Princesse that he was bringing
back to memory, not the brown, mignon face that had been so late close
to his in the light of the moon.

Meanwhile, on his good gray, Cigarette rode like a true Chasseur
herself. She was used to the saddle, and would ride a wild desert colt
without stirrup or bridle; balancing her supple form now on one foot,
now on the other, on the animal's naked back, while they flew at full
speed. Not so fantastically, but full as speedily, she dashed down into
the city, scatteri