ver had subsided, and toward morning his incoherent words ceased, his
breathing grew calmer and more tranquil; he fell asleep--sleep that was
profound, dreamless, and refreshing.

She looked at him with a tempestuous shadow darkening her face, that
was soft with a tenderness that she could not banish. She hated him; she
ought to have stabbed or shot him rather than have tended him thus; he
neglected her, and only thought of that woman of his old Order. As a
daughter of the People, as a child of the Army, as a soldier of France,
she ought to have killed him rather than have caressed his hair and
soothed his pain! Pshaw! She ground one in another her tiny white teeth,
that were like a spaniel's.

Then gently, very gently, lest she should waken him, she took her tunic
skirt with which she had covered him from the chills of the night, put
more broken wood on the fading fire, and with a last, lingering look
at him where he slept, passed out from the tent as the sun rose in a
flushed and beautiful dawn. He would never know that she had saved him
thus: he never should know it, she vowed in her heart.

Cigarette was very haughty in her own wayward, careless fashion. At a
word of love from him, at a kiss from his lips, at a prayer from his
voice, she would have given herself to him in all the abandonment of a
first passion, and have gloried in being known as his mistress. But she
would have perished by a thousand deaths rather than have sought him
through his pity or through his gratitude; rather than have accepted the
compassion of a heart that gave its warmth to another; rather than have
ever let him learn that he was any more to her than all their other
countless comrades who filled up the hosts of Africa.

"He will never know," she said to herself, as she passed through the
disordered camp, and in a distant quarter coiled herself among the hay
of a forage-wagon, and covered up in dry grass, like a bird in a nest,
let her tired limbs lie and her aching eyes close in repose. She was
very tired; and every now and then, as she slept, a quick, sobbing
breath shook her as she slumbered, like a worn-out fawn who has been
wounded while it played.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST.

With the reveille and the break of morning Cigarette woke, herself
again; she gave a little petulant shake to her fairy form when she
thought of what folly she had been guilty. "Ah, bah! you deserve to be
shot," she said to herself afres