o fling
over him; she took off her blue cloth tunic and threw it across his
chest, and, shivering despite herself, curled closer to the little fire.

She did not know why she did it--he was nothing to her--and yet she kept
herself wide awake through the dark autumn night, lest he should sigh or
stir and she not hear him.

"I have saved his life twice," she thought, looking at him; "beware of
the third time, they say!"

He moved restlessly, and she went to him. His face was flushed now; his
breath came rapidly and shortly; there was some fever on him. The linen
was displaced from his wounds; she dipped it again in water, and laid
the cooled bands on them. "Ah, bah! If I were not unsexed enough for
this, how would it be with you now?" she said in her teeth. He tossed
wearily to and fro; detached words caught her ear as he muttered them.

"Let it be, let it be--he is welcome! How could I prove it at his cost?
I saved him--I could do that. It was not much----"

She listened with intent anxiety to hear the other whispers ending the
sentence, but they were stifled and broken.

"Tiens!" she murmured below her breath. "It is for some other he has
ruined himself."

She could not catch the words that followed. They were in an unknown
language to her, for she knew nothing of English, and they poured fast
and obscure from his lips as he moved in feverish unrest; the wine that
had saved him from exhaustion inflaming his brain in his sleep. Now and
then French phrases crossed the English ones; she leaned down to seize
their meaning till her cheek was against his forehead, till her lips
touched his hair; and at that half caress her heart beat, her face
flushed, her mouth trembled with a too vivid joy, with an impulse, half
fear and half longing, that had never so moved her before.

"If I had my birthright," he muttered in her own tongue. "If I had
it--would she look so cold then? She might love me--women used once. O
God! if she had not looked on me, I had never known all I had lost!"

Cigarette started as if a knife had stabbed her, and sprang up from her
rest beside him.

"She--she--always she!" she muttered fiercely, while her face grew
duskily scarlet in the fire-glow of the tent; and she went slowly away,
back to the low wood fire.

This was to be ever her reward!

Her eyes glistened and flashed with the fiery, vengeful passions of her
hot and jealous instincts. Cigarette had in her the violence, as she
had the nob