and the hatred of the contest were shown in the fact that there were very few merely wounded or disabled; almost all the numbers that strewed the plain were dead.  It had been a battle-royal, and, but for her arrival with the fresh squadrons, not one among her countrymen would have lived to tell the story of this terrible duello which had been as magnificent in heroism as any Austerlitz or Gemappes, but which would pass unhonored, almost unnamed, among the futile, fruitless heroisms of Algerian warfare.

“Is he killed?  Is he killed?” she thought, as she bent over each knot of motionless bodies, where, here and there, some faint, stifled breath, or some moan of agony, told that life still lingered beneath the huddled, stiffening heap.  And a tightness came at her heart, an aching fear made her shrink, as she raised each hidden face, that she had never known before.  “What if he be?” she said fiercely to herself.  “It is nothing to me.  I hate him, the cold aristocrat!  I ought to be glad if I see him lie here.”

But, despite her hatred for him, she could not banish that hot, feverish hope, that cold, suffocating fear, which, turn by turn, quickened and slackened the bright flow of her warm, young blood as she searched among the slain.

“Ah! le pauvre Picpon!” she said softly, as she reached at last the place where the young Chasseur lay, and lifted the black curls off his forehead.  The hoofs of the charging cavalry had cruelly struck and trampled his frame; the back had been broken, and the body had been mashed as in a mortar under the thundering gallop of the Horse; but the face was still uninjured, and had a strange, pathetic beauty, a calm and smiling courage on it.  It was ashen pale; but the great black eyes that had glistened in such malicious mirth, and sparkled in such malignant mischief during life, were open, and had a mournful, pitiful serenity in their look as if from their depths the soul still gazed—­that soul which had been neglected and cursed, and left to wander among evil ways, yet which, through all its darkness, all its ignorance, had reached, unguided, to love and to nobility.

Cigarette closed their long, black lashes down on the white cheeks with soft and reverent touch; she had seen that look ere now on the upturned faces of the dead who had strewn the barricades of Paris, with the words of the Marseillaise the last upon their lips.

To her there could be no fate fairer, no glory more glorious, than this of his—­to die for France.  And she laid him gently down, and left him, and went on with her quest.

It was here that she had lost sight of Cecil as they had charged together, and her mare, enraged and intoxicated with noise and terror, had torn away at full speed that had outstripped even the swiftest of her Spahis.  A little farther on a dog’s moan caught her ear; she turned and looked across.  Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers, sat the small, snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air with its little paws, as it had been taught to do when it needed anything, and howling piteously as it begged.