rses
gasping and writhing, with men raving like mad creatures in the torture
of their wounds. It was a sight which always went to her heart. She was
a true soldier, and, though, she could deal death pitilessly, could,
when the delirium of war was over, tend and yield infinite compassion
to those who were in suffering. But such scenes had been familiar to her
from the earliest years when, on an infant's limbs, she had toddled over
such battlefields, and wound tiny hands in the hair of some dead trooper
who had given her sweetmeats the hour before, vainly trying to awaken
him. And she went through all the intense misery and desolation of the
scene now without shrinking, and with that fearless, tender devotion to
the wounded which Cigarette showed in common with other soldiers of her
nation; being, like them, a young lion in the combat, but a creature
unspeakably gentle and full of sympathy when the fury of the fight was
over.

She had seen great slaughter often enough, but even she had not seen any
struggle more close, more murderous, than this had been. The dead lay
by hundreds; French and Arab locked in one another's limbs as they had
fallen when the ordinary mode of warfare had failed to satiate their
violence, and they had wrestled together like wolves fighting and
rending each ocher over a disputed carcass. The bitterness and the
hatred of the contest were shown in the fact that there were very few
merely wounded or disabled; almost all the numbers that strewed the
plain were dead. It had been a battle-royal, and, but for her arrival
with the fresh squadrons, not one among her countrymen would have lived
to tell the story of this terrible duello which had been as magnificent
in heroism as any Austerlitz or Gemappes, but which would pass
unhonored, almost unnamed, among the futile, fruitless heroisms of
Algerian warfare.

"Is he killed? Is he killed?" she thought, as she bent over each knot of
motionless bodies, where, here and there, some faint, stifled breath, or
some moan of agony, told that life still lingered beneath the huddled,
stiffening heap. And a tightness came at her heart, an aching fear made
her shrink, as she raised each hidden face, that she had never known
before. "What if he be?" she said fiercely to herself. "It is nothing to
me. I hate him, the cold aristocrat! I ought to be glad if I see him lie
here."

But, despite her hatred for him, she could not banish that hot, feverish
hope, that cold, s