Her face was very earnest, very eloquent, very dark, and tender with thought; there was a vein of grave, even of intense feeling, that ran through the significant words to which tone and accent lent far more meaning than lay in their mere phrases; the little bohemian lost her insolence when she pleaded for her “children,” her comrades; and the mischievous pet of the camp never treated lightly what touched the France that she loved—­the France that, alone of all things in her careless life, she held in honor and reverence.

“You will not make me see it again?” she said, once more leaning out, with her eyes, that were like a brown brook sparkling deep, yet bright in the sun, fixed on him.  “They would rise at your bidding, and they would be mowed down like corn.  You will not?”

“Never!  I give you my word.”

The promise was from his heart.  He would have endured any indignity, any outrage, rather than have drawn into ruin, through him, the fiery, fearless, untutored lives of the men who marched, and slept, and rode, and fought, and lay in the light of the picket-fires, and swept down through the hot sandstorms on to the desert foe by his side.  Cigarette stretched out her hand to him—­that tiny brown hand, which, small though it was, had looked so burned and so hard beside the delicate fairy ivory carvings of his workmanship—­stretched it out with a frank, winning, childlike, soldierlike grace.

“That’s right, you are a true soldier!”

He bent over the hand she held to his in the courtesy natural with him to all her sex, and touched it lightly with his lips.

“Thank you, my little comrade,” he said simply, with the graver thought still on him that her relation and her entreaty had evoked; “you have given me a lesson that I shall not be quick to forget.”

Cigarette was the wildest little baccanal that ever pirouetted for the delight of half a score of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves and half-drunk; she was the most reckless coquette that ever made the roll-call of her lovers range from prince-marshals to plowboy conscripts; she had flirted as far and wide as the butterfly flirts with the blossoms it flutters on to through the range of a summer day; she took kisses, if the giver of them were handsome, as readily as a child takes sweetmeats at Mardi Gras; and of feminine honor, feminine scruples, feminine delicacy, knew nothing save by such very dim, fragmentary instincts as nature still planted in scant growth amid the rank soil and the pestilent atmosphere of camp-life.  Her eyes had never sunk, her face had never flushed, her heart had never panted for the boldest or the wildest wooer of them all, from M. de Duc’s Lauzunesque blandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire’s or Miou-Miou’s rough overtures; she had the coquetry of her nation with the audacity of a boy.  Now only, for the first time, Cigarette colored hotly at the grave, graceful, distant salute, so cold and so courteous, which was offered her in lieu of the rude and boisterous familiarities to which she was accustomed; and drew her hand away with what was, to the shame of her soldierly hardihood and her barrack tutelage, very nearly akin to an impulse of shyness.