“Ah!”

She drew a short, quick breath.  She understood that; she would only have laughed at him had it been a woman; Cigarette was more veracious than complimentary in her estimate of her own sex.

“There was a man in the Cuirassiers I knew,” she went on softly, “loved a horse like that;—­he would have died for Cossack—­but he was a terrible gambler, terrible.  Not but what I like to play myself.  Well, one day he played and played till he was mad, and everything was gone; and then in his rage he staked the only thing he had left.  Staked and lost the horse!  He never said a word; but he just slipped a pistol in his pocket, went to the stable, kissed Cossack once—­twice—­thrice—­and shot himself through the heart.”

“Poor fellow!” murmured the Chasseur d’Afrique, in his chestnut beard.

Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her falcon eyes; “he had gambled away a good deal too,” she thought.  “It is always the same old story with them.”

“Your cigars are good, mon lion,” she said impatiently, as she sprang up; her lithe, elastic figure in the bright vivandiere uniform standing out in full relief against the pearly gray of the ruined pillars, the vivid green of the rank vegetation, and the intense light of the noon.  “Your cigars are good, but it is more than your company is!  If you had been as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a single turn with you in the cancan!”

And with a bound to which indignation lent wings like a swallow’s, the Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the apathy with which her advances to friendship had been received, dashed off at her topmost speed, singing all the louder out of bravado.  “To have nothing more to say to me after dancing with me all night!” thought Cigarette, with fierce wrath at such contumely, the first neglect the pet of the Spahis had ever experienced.

She was incensed, too, that she had been degraded into that momentary wish that she knew how to read and looked less like a boy—­just because a Chasseur with white hands and silent ways had made her a grave bow!  She was more incensed still because she could not get at his history, and felt, despite herself, a reluctance to bribe him for it with those cajoleries whose potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux.  “Let him take care!” muttered the soldier-coquette passionately, in her little white teeth; so small and so pearly, though they had gripped a bridle tight before then, when each hand was filled with a pistol.  “Let him take care!  If he offend me there are five hundred swords that will thrust civility into him, five hundred shots that will teach him the cost of daring to provoke Cigarette!”

En route through the town her wayward way took the pretty brunette Friend of the Flag as many devious meandering as a bird takes in a summer’s day flight, when it stops here for a berry, there for a grass seed, here to dip its beak into cherries, there to dart after a dragon-fly, here to shake its wings in a brook, there to poise on a lily-bell.