“Ah,” she said softly and waywardly, winding her way aright with that penetration and tact which, however unsexed in other things, Cigarette had kept thoroughly feminine.  “That was but an idle word of mine; forgive it, and forget it.  You are not a slave when you fight in the fantasias.  Morbleu!  They say to see you kill a man is beautiful—­so workmanlike!  And you would go out and be shot to-morrow, rather than sell your honor, or stain it.  Bah! while you know they should cut your heart out rather than make you tell a lie, or betray a comrade, you are no slave; you have the best freedom of all.  Take a glass of champagne?  How you look!  Oh, the demoiselles, with the silver necks, are not barrack drink, of course; but I drink champagne always myself.  This is M. le Prince’s.  He knows I only take the best brands.”

With which Cigarette, leaning down from her casement, whose sill was about a foot above his head, tendered her peace-offering in a bottle; three of which, packed in her knapsack, she had carried off from the luncheon-table of a Russian Prince who was touring through Algiers, and who had half lost his Grand Ducal head after the bewitching, dauntless, capricious, unattachable, unpurchasable, and coquettish little fire-eater of the Spahis, who treated him with infinitely more insolence and indifference than she would show to some battered old veteran, or some worn-out old dog, who had passed through the great Kabaila raids and battles.

“You will go to your Colonel’s to-night?” she said questioningly, as he drank the champagne, and thanked her—­for he saw the spirit in which the gift was tendered—­as he leaned against the half-ruined Moorish wall, with its blue-and-white striped awning spread over both their heads in the little street whose crowds, chatter, thousand eyes, and incessant traffic no way troubled Cigarette; who had talked argot to monarchs undaunted, and who had been one of the chief sights in a hundred grand reviews ever since she had been perched on a gun-carriage at five years old, and paraded with a troop of horse artillery in the Champ de Mars, as having gone through the whole of Bugeaud’s campaign, at which parade, by the way, being tendered sweetmeats by a famous General’s wife, Cigarette had made the immortal reply:  “Madame, my sweetmeats are bullets!”

She repeated her question imperiously, as Cecil kept silent.  “You will go to-night?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  He did not care to discuss his Colonel’s orders with this pretty little Bacchante.

“Oh, a chief’s command, you know—­”

“Ah, a fig for a chief!” retorted Cigarette impatiently.  “Why don’t you say the truth?  You are thinking you will disobey, and risk the rest!”

“Well, why not?  I grant his right in barrack and field, but——­”

He spoke rather to himself than her, and his thoughts, as he spoke, went back to the scene of the morning.  He felt, with a romantic impulse that he smiled at, even as it passed over him, that he would rather have half a dozen muskets fired at him in the death-sentence of a mutineer than meet again the glance of those proud, azure eyes, sweeping over him in their calm indifference to a private of Chasseurs, their calm ignorance that he could be wounded or be stung.