fore a new song from Gris-Gris, the best tenor
in the whole army, would have been paradise to her, and she would have
vaulted through the window at a single bound into the pandemonium. Now,
she did not know why, she found no charm in it.

And she went quietly home to her little straw-bed in her garret, and
curled herself up like a kitten to sleep; but for the first time in her
young life sleep did not come readily to her, and when it did come, for
the first time found a restless sigh upon her laughing mouth.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING.

"Fighting in the Kabaila, life was well enough; but here!" thought Cecil
as, earlier awake than those of his Chambree, he stood looking down the
lengthy, narrow room where the men lay asleep along the bare floor.

Tired as overworked cattle, and crouched or stretched like worn-out,
homeless dogs, they had never wakened as he had noiselessly harnessed
himself, and he looked at them with that interest in other lives that
had come to him through adversity; for if misfortune had given him
strength it had also given him sympathy.

They were of marvelously various types--these sleepers brought under one
roof by fates the most diverse. Close beside a huge and sinewy brute
of an Auvergnat, whose coarse, bestial features and massive bull's head
were fitter for a galley-slave than a soldier, were the lithe, exquisite
limbs and the oval, delicate face of a man from the Valley of the Rhone.
Beneath a canopy of flapping, tawny wild-beast skins, the spoils of his
own hands, was flung the torso of one of the splendid peasants of the
Sables d'Olonne; one steeped so long in blood and wine and alcohol that
he had forgotten the blue, bright waves that broke on the western shores
of his boyhood's home, save when he muttered thirstily in his dreams of
the cool sea, as he was muttering now. Next him, curled, dog-like, with
its round, black head meeting its feet, was a wiry frame on which every
muscle was traced like network, and the skin burned black as jet under
twenty years of African sun. The midnight streets of Paris had seen its
birth, the thieves' quarter had been its nest; it had no history, it had
almost no humanity; it was a perfect machine for slaughter, no more--who
had ever tried to make it more?

Further on lay, sleeping fitfully, a boy of scarcely more than
seventeen, with rounded cheeks and fair, white brow like a child's,
whose uncovered chest was delicate as a g