afraid it should be
found out; but, if they do one in the world there, they bray it at
the tops of their voices from the houses' roofs, and run all down the
streets screaming about it, for fear it should be lost. Dieu! we are
droll!"

And she dashed the spurs into her mare and galloped off at the height
of her speed into camp--a very city of canvas, buzzing with the hum
of life, regulated with the marvelous skill and precision of French
warfare, yet with the carelessness and the picturesqueness of the
desert-life pervading it.

"C'est la Cigarette!" ran from mouth to mouth, as the bay mare with her
little Amazon rider, followed by the scarlet cloud of the Spahis, all
ablaze like poppies in the sun, rose in sight, thrown out against the
azure of the skies.

What she had done had been told long before by an orderly, riding hard
in the early night to take the news of the battle; and the whole host
was on watch for its darling--the savior of the honor of France. Like
wave rushing on wave of some tempestuous ocean, the men swept out to
meet her in one great, surging tide of life, impetuous, passionate,
idolatrous, exultant; with all the vivid ardor, all the uncontrolled
emotion, of natures south-born, sun-nurtured. They broke away from their
midday rest as from their military toil, moved as by one swift breath
of fire, and flung themselves out to meet her, the chorus of a thousand
voices ringing in deafening vivas to the skies. She was enveloped
in that vast sea of eager, furious lives; in that dizzy tumult of
vociferous cries and stretching hands and upturned faces. As her
soldiers had done the night before, so these did now--kissing her hands,
her dress, her feet; sending her name in thunder through the sunlit air;
lifting her from off her horse, and bearing her, in a score of stalwart
arms, triumphant in their midst.

She was theirs--their own--the Child of the Army, the Little One whose
voice above their dying brethren had the sweetness of an angel's song,
and whose feet, in their hours of revelry, flew like the swift and
dazzling flight of gold-winged orioles. And she had saved the honor of
their Eagles; she had given to them and to France their god of
Victory. They loved her--O God, how they loved her!--with that intense,
breathless, intoxicating love of a multitude which, though it may stone
to-morrow what it adores to-day, has yet for those on whom it has once
been given thus a power no other love can know--a pa