rested on the
other. They died around him every day; the fearless, fiery blood of
France watered in ceaseless streams the arid, harvestless fields of
northern Africa. Death was so common that the fall of a comrade was no
more noted by them than the fall of a loose stone that their horse's
foot shook down a precipice. Yet this death was very bitter to him. He
wondered with a dull sense of aching impatience why no Bedouin bullet,
no Arab saber, had ever found his own life out, and cut his thralls
asunder.

The evening had just followed on the glow of the day--evening, more
lustrous even than ever, for the houses were all aglitter with endless
lines of colored lamps and strings of sparkling illuminations, a very
sea of bright-hued fire. The noise, the mirth, the sudden swell of
music, the pleasure-seeking crowds--all that were about him--served only
to make more desolate and more oppressive by their contrast his memories
of that life, once gracious, and gifted, and content with the dower of
its youth, ruined by a woman, and now slaughtered here, for no avail and
with no honor, by a lance-thrust in a midnight skirmish, which had been
unrecorded even in the few lines of the gazette that chronicled the war
news of Algeria.

Passing one of the cafes, a favorite resort of the officers of his own
regiment, he saw Cigarette. A sheaf of blue, and white, and scarlet
lights flashed with tongues of golden flame over her head, and a great
tricolor flag, with the brass eagle above it, was hanging in the still,
hot air from the balcony from which she leaned. Her tunic-skirt was full
of bonbons and crackers that she was flinging down among the crowd
while she sang; stopping every now and then to exchange some passage of
gaulois wit with them that made her hearers scream with laughter, while
behind her was a throng of young officers drinking champagne, eating
ices, and smoking; echoing her songs and her satires with enthusiastic
voices and stamps of their spurred bootheels. As he glanced upward, she
looked literally in a blaze of luminance, and the wild, mellow tones of
her voice, ringing out sounded like a mockery of that dying-bed beside
which they had both so late stood together.

"She has the playfulness of the young leopard, and the cruelty," he
thought, with a sense of disgust; forgetting that she did not know what
he knew, and that, if Cigarette had waited to laugh until death had
passed by, she would have never laughed all her