When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of the dance delirium, she did with her beholders what she would.  The famous Cachucha, that made the reverend cardinals of Spain fling off their pontifical vestments and surrender themselves to the witchery of the castanets and the gleam of the white, twinkling feet, was never more irresistible, more enchanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace.  It was a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus.

All her heart was in it—­that heart of a girl and a soldier, of a hawk and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a Lascar and a child, which beat so brightly and so boldly under the dainty gold aiglettes, with which she laced her dashing little uniform.

In the Chambers of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, on sandy soil under African stars, above the heaped plunder brought in from a razzia, in the yellow light of candles fastened to bayonets stuck in the earth at a bivouac, on the broad deal table of a barrack-room full of black-browed conscrits indigenes, amid the thundering echoes of the Marseillaise des Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves, Cigarette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious life seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief of her little brigand’s soul seemed to have found their utterance in those tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that never looked to touch the earth which they lit on lightly as a bird alights, only to leave it afresh, with wider, swifter bound, with ceaseless, airy flight.

So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique.  She had a famous group of spectators, not one of whom knew how to hold himself back from springing in to seize her in his arms, and whirl with her down the floor.  But it had been often told them by experience that, unless she beckoned one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of her impromptu pas de seul would be the immediate result.  Her spectators were renowned croc-mitaines; men whose names rang like trumpets in the ear of Kabyle and Marabout; men who had fought under the noble colors of the day of Mazagran, or had cherished or emulated its traditions; men who had the salient features of all the varied species that make up the soldiers of Africa.

There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson burnous wrapped round his towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as before a pestilence—­the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of all the Spahis; brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves; all an Arab when once back in the desert; with a blow of a scabbard his only payment for forage, and a thrust of his saber his only apology to husbands; but to the service a slave, and in the combat a lion.

There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, whose snowy turban and olive beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; who himself affected to neglect his conquests, with a supreme contempt for those indulgences, but who would have been led out and shot rather than forego the personal adornings for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled unceasing wrath at him with every day that shone.