“Dame!  Don’t humbug me!  I am not a court lady!” she cried hastily, almost petulantly, to cover the unwonted and unwelcome weakness; while, to make good the declaration and revindicate her military renown, she balanced herself lightly on the stone ledge of her oval hole, and sprang, with a young wildcat’s easy, vaulting leap, over his head, and over the heads of the people beneath, on to the ledge of the house opposite, a low-built wine-shop, whose upper story nearly touched the leaning walls of the old Moorish buildings in which she had been perched.  The crowd in the street below looked up, amazed and aghast, at that bound from casement to casement as she flew over their heads like a blue-and-scarlet winged bird of Oran; but they laughed as they saw who it was.

“It is Cigarette!  Ah, ha! the devil, for a certainty, must have been her father!”

“To be sure!” cried the Friend of the Flag, looking from her elevation; “he is a very good father, too, and I don’t tease him like his sons the priests!  But I have told him to take you the next time you are stripping a dead body; so look on it—­he won’t have to wait long.”

The discomfited Indigene hustled his way, with many an oath, through the laughing crowd as best he might; and Cigarette, with an airy pirouette on the wine-shop’s roof that would have done honor to any opera boards, and was executed as carelessly, twenty feet above earth, as if she had been a pantomime-dancer all her days, let herself down by the awning, hand over hand, like a little mouse from the harbor, jumped on to a forage wagon that was just passing full trot down the street, and disappeared; standing on the piles of hay, and singing.

Cecil looked after her, with a certain touch of pity for her in him.

“What a gallant boy is spoiled in that little Amazon!” he thought; the quick flush of her face, the quick withdrawal of her hand, he had not noticed; she had not much interest for him,—­scarcely any indeed,—­save that he saw she was pretty, with a mignonne, mischievous face, that all the sun-tan of Africa and all the wild life of the Caserne would not harden or debase.  But he was sorry a child so bright and so brave should be turned into three parts a trooper as she was, should have been tossed up on the scum and filth of the lowest barrack life, and should be doomed in a few years’ time to become the yellow, battered, foul-mouthed, vulture-eyed camp-follower that premature old age would surely render the darling of the tricolor, the pythoness of the As de Pique.

Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of Sex, dancing it down, drinking it down, laughing it down, burning it out in tobacco fumes, drowning it in trembling cascades of wine, trampling it to dust under the cancan by her little brass-bound boots, mocking it away with her slang jests, and her Theresa songs, and her devil-may-care audacities, till there was scarce a trace of it left in this prettiest and wildest little scamp of all the Army in Africa.  But strive to kill it how she would, her sex would have its revenge one day and play Nemesis to her.