cloudless scorch of their native
skies, under whose freedom they would never again ride forth to the
joyous clash of the cymbals and the fierce embrace of the death-grapple.

When at length she returned, coming in with her ruthless Spahis, whose
terrible passions she feared no more than Vergil's Volscian huntress
feared the beasts of the forest and plain, the raven still hovered above
her exhausted mare, the torn flag was still in her left hand; and the
bright laughter, the flash of ecstatic triumph, was still in her face
as she sang the last lines of her own war-chant. The leopard nature
was roused in her. She was a soldier; death had been about her from her
birth; she neither feared to give nor to receive it; she was proud as
ever was young Pompeius flushed with the glories of his first eastern
conquests; she was happy as such elastic, sun-lit, dauntless youth as
hers alone can be, returning in the reddening after-glow, at the head of
her comrades, to the camp that she had saved.

She could be cruel--women are, when roused, as many a revolution has
shown; she could be heroic--she would have died a hundred deaths for
France; she was vain with a vivacious, childlike vanity; she was brave
with a bravery beside which many a man's high courage paled. Cruelty,
heroism, vanity, and bravery were all on fire, and all fed to their
uttermost, most eager, most ardent flame, now that she came back at the
head of her Spahis; while all who remained of the soldiers who, but for
her, would have been massacred long ere then, without one spared
among them, threw themselves forward, crowded round her, caressed, and
laughed, and wept, and shouted with all the changes of their intense
mercurial temperaments; kissed her boots, her sash, her mare's drooping
neck, and, lifting her, with wild vivas that rent the sky, on to the
shoulders of the two tallest men among them, bore her to the presence of
the only officer of high rank who had survived the terrors of the day, a
Chef de Bataillon of the Zouaves.

And he, a grave and noble-looking veteran, uncovered his head and bowed
before her as courtiers bow before their queens.

"Mademoiselle, you saved the honor of France. In the name of France, I
thank you."

The tears rushed swift and hot into Cigarette's bright eyes--tears of
joy, tears of pride. She was but a child still in much, and she could
be moved by the name of France as other children by the name of their
mothers.

"Chut! I did n