“But?” echoed Cigarette, leaning out of her oval hole, perched in the quaint, gray Moresco wall, parti-colored with broken encaustics of varied hues.  “Chut, bon comrade!  That little word has been the undoing of the world ever since the world began.  ‘But’ is a blank cartridge, and never did anything but miss fire yet.  Shoot dead, or don’t aim at all, whichever you like; but never make a false stroke with ‘but’!  So you won’t obey Chateauroy in this?”

He was silent again.  He would not answer falsely, and he did not care to say his thoughts to her.

“‘No,’” pursued Cigarette, translating his silence at her fancy, “you say to yourself, ’I am an aristocrat—­I will not be ordered in this thing’—­you say, ’I am a good soldier; I will not be sent for like a hawker’—­you say, ’I was noble once:  I will show my blood at last, if I die!’ Ah!—­you say that!”

He laughed a little as he looked up at her.

“Not exactly that, but something as foolish, perhaps.  Are you a witch, my pretty one?”

“Whoever doubted it, except you?”

She looked one, in truth, whom few men could resist, bending to him out of her owls’ nest, with the flash of the sun under the blue awning brightly catching the sunny brown of her soft cheek and the cherry bloom of her lips, arched, pouting, and coquette.  She set her teeth sharply, and muttered a hot, heavy sacre, or even something worse, as she saw that his eyes had not even remained on her, but were thoughtfully looking down the checkered light and color of the street.  She was passionate, she was vain, she was wayward, she was fierce as a little velvet leopard, as a handsome, brilliant plumaged hawk; she had all the faults, as she had all the virtues, of the thorough Celtic race; and, for the moment, she had in instinct—­fiery, ruthless, and full of hate—­to draw the pistol out of her belt, and teach him with a shot, crash through heart or brain, that girls who were “unsexed” could keep enough of the woman in them not to be neglected with impunity, and could lose enough of it to be able to avenge the negligence by a summary vendetta.  But she was a haughty little condottiere, in her fashion.  She would not ask for what was not offered her, nor give a rebuke that might be traced to mortification.  She only set her two rosebud-lips in as firm a line of wrath and scorn as ever Caesar’s or Napoleon’s molded themselves into, and spoke in the curt, imperious, generalissimo fashion with which Cigarette before now had rallied a demoralized troop, reeling drunk and mad away from a razzia.

“I am a witch!  That is, I can put two and two together, and read men, though I don’t read the alphabet.  Well, one reading is a good deal rarer than the other.  So you mean to disobey the Hawk to-night?  I like you for that.  But listen here—­did you ever hear them talk of Marquise?”

“No!”

“Parbleu!” swore the vivandiere in her wrath, “you look on at a bamboula as if it were only a bear-cub dancing, and can only give one ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ as if one were a drummer-boy.  Bah! are those your Paris courtesies?”