“Forgive me, ma belle!  I thought you called yourself our comrade, and would have no ‘fine manners.’  There is no knowing how to please you.”

He might have pleased her simply and easily enough, if he had only looked up with a shade of interest to that most picturesque picture, bright as a pastel portrait, that was hung above him in the old tumble-down Moorish stonework.  But his thoughts were with other things; and a love scene with this fantastic little Amazon did not attract him.  The warm, ripe, mellow little wayside cherry hung directly in his path, with the sun on its bloom, and the free wind tossing it merrily; but it had no charm for him.  He was musing rather on that costly, delicate, brilliant-hued, hothouse blossom that could only be reached down by some rich man’s hand, and grew afar on heights where never winter chills, nor summer tan, could come too rudely on it.

“Come, tell me what is Marquise?—­a kitten?” he went on, leaning his arm still on the sill of her embrasure, and willing to coax her out of her anger.

“A kitten!” echoed Cigarette contemptuously.  “You think me a child, I suppose?”

“Surely you are not far off it?”

“Mon Dieu! why, I was never a child in my life,” retorted Cigarette, waxing sunny-tempered and confidential again, while she perched herself, like some gay-feathered mockingbird on a branch, on the window-sill itself.  “When I was two, I used to be beaten; when I was three, I used to scrape up the cigar ends the officers dropped about, to sell them again for a bit of black bread; when I was four, I knew all about Philippe Durron’s escape from Beylick, and bit my tongue through, to say nothing, when my mother flogged me with a mule-whip, because I would not tell, that she might tell again at the Bureau and get the reward.  A child!  Before I was two feet high I had winged my first Arab.  He stole a rabbit I was roasting.  Presto! how quick he dropped it when my ball broke his wrist like a twig!”

And the Friend of the Flag laughed gayly at the recollection, as at the best piece of mirth with which memory could furnish her.

“But you asked about Marquise?  Well, he was what you are—­a hawk among carrion crows, a gentleman in the ranks.  Dieu! how handsome he was!  Nobody ever knew his real name, but they thought he was of Austrian breed, and we called him Marquise because he was so womanish white in his skin and dainty in all his ways.  Just like you!  Marquise could fight, fight like a hundred devils; and—­pouf!—­how proud he was—­very much like you altogether!  Now, one day something went wrong in the exercise ground.  Marquise was not to blame, but they thought he was; and an adjutant struck him—­flick, flack, like that—­across the face with a riding switch.  Marquise had his bayonet fixed and before we knew what was up, crash the blade went through—­through the breast-bone, and out at the spine—­and the adjutant fell as dead as a cat, with the blood spouting out like