s 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 honour 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 passion unutterably
sad, deliriously strong.

That passion moved her strangely.

As she looked down upon them, she knew that not one man breathed among
that tumultuous mass but would have died that moment at her word; not
one mouth moved among that countless host but breathed her name in
pride, and love, and honour.

She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little brigand, a
child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; but she was more
than these. The divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette
would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne d'Arc.
The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable
patriotism, the melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and
unnumbered sufferings of the people were in her, instinctive and inborn,
as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved her
now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the
crowded soldiery.

"It was nothing," she answered them; "it was nothing. It was for
France."

For France! They shouted back the beloved word with tenfold joy; and the
great sea of life beneath her tossed to and fro in stormy triumph, in
frantic paradise of victory, ringing her name with that of France upon
the air, in thunder-shouts like spears of steel