“There are many losses that are bitter enough,” he mused; “but there is not one so bitter as the loss of the right to resent!”

A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the music of the shrill violins and thundering drums, echoed through the rooms and shook him from his reverie.

“They are bons enfants,” he thought, with a half smile, as he listened; “they are more honest in their mirth, as in their wrath, than we ever were in that old world of mine.”

Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice of Cigarette rose distinct.  She had apparently paused in her dancing to exchange one of those passes of arms which were her specialty, in the Sabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as her mother tongue.

“You call him a misanthrope?” she cried disdainfully.  “And you have been drinking at his expense, you rascal?”

The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.

“Ingrate!” pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere; “you would pawn your mother’s grave-clothes!  You would eat your children, en fricassee!  You would sell your father’s bones for a draught of brandy!”

The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette’s style of withering eloquence was suited to all her auditors’ tastes, and under the chorus of laughs at his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roared forth a defiance.

“White hands and a brunette’s face are fine things for a soldier.  He kills women—­he kills women with his lady’s grace!”

“He does not pull their ears to make them give him their money, and beat them with a stick if they don’t fry his eggs fast enough, as you do, Barbe-Grise,” retorted the contemptuous tones of the champion of the absent.  “White hands, morbleu!  Well, his hands are not always in other people’s pockets as yours are!”

This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; the screams of mirth redoubled.  Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whom the wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he was getting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette’s tongue, to the infinite glee of the whole ballroom.

“Dame!—­his hands cannot work as mine can!” growled her opponent.

“Oh, ho!” cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; “they don’t twist cocks’ throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours; but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appetite, if they could touch such canaille.”

“Canaille?” thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise.  “If you were but a man!”

“What would you do to me, brigand?” screamed Cigarette, in fits of laughter.  “Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave you last week for stealing his gun from a new soldier?”

A growl like a lion’s from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; she had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappy young conscript’s rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him, and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.