panish Princesse. Cigarette caught at the inference with the
quickness of her lightning-like thought.

"Oh, ha! So it is she!"

There was a whole world of emphasis, scorn, meaning, wrath,
comprehension, and irony in the four monosyllables; the dying man looked
at her with languid wonder.

"She? Who? What story goes with these roses?"

"None," said Cecil, with the same inflection of annoyance in his voice;
to have his passing encounter with this beautiful patrician pass into a
barrack canard, through the unsparing jests of the soldiery around
him, was a prospect very unwelcome to him. "None whatever. A generous
thoughtfulness for our common necessities as soldiers--"

"Ouf!" interrupted Cigarette, before his phrase was one-third finished.
"The stalled mare will not go with the wild coursers; an aristocrat may
live with us, but he will always cling to his old order. This is the
story that runs with the roses. Milady was languidly insolent over some
ivory chessmen, and Corporal Victor thought it divine, because languor
and insolence are the twin gods of the noblesse, parbleu! Milady,
knowing no gods but those two, worships them, and sends to the soldiers
of France, as the sort of sacrifice her gods love, fruits, and wines
that, day after day, are set on her table, to be touched, if tasted at
all, with a butterfly's sip; and Corporal Victor finds this a charity
sublime--to give what costs nothing, and scatter a few crumbs out from
the profusion of a life of waste and indulgence! And I say that, if my
children are of my fashion of thinking, they will choke like dogs dying
of thirst rather than slake their throats with alms cast to them as if
they were beggars!"

With which fiery and bitter enunciation of her views on the gifts of the
Princesse Corona d'Amague, Cigarette struck light to her brule-guele,
and thrusting it between her lips, with her hands in the folds of her
scarlet waist-sash, went off with the light, swift step natural to her,
exaggerated into the carriage she had learned of the Zouaves; laughing
her good-morrows noisily to this and that trooper as she passed their
couches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the place where
the dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudent
drinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever celebrated
wine, women, and war in the lawlessness of the lingua Sabir.

Her wrath was hot, and her heart heavy within her. She had given up her
who