She was bewitching now—­bewitching, though she had no witchery for him—­in her youth.  But when the bloom should leave her brown cheeks, and the laughter die out of her lightning glance, the womanhood she had denied would assert itself, and avenge itself, and be hideous in the sight of the men who now loved the tinkling of those little spurred feet, and shouted with applause to hear the reckless barrack blasphemies ring their mirth from the fresh mouth which was now like a bud from a damask rose branch, though even now it steeped itself in wine, and sullied itself with oaths and seared itself with smoke, and had never been touched from its infancy with any kiss that was innocent—­not even with its mother’s.

And there was a deep tinge of pity for her in Cecil’s thoughts as he watched her out of sight, and then strolled across to the cafe opposite to finish his cigar beneath its orange-striped awning.  The child had been flung upward, a little straw floating in the gutter of Paris iniquities.  It was little marvel that the bright, bold, insolent little Friend of the Flag had nothing of her sex left save a kitten’s mischief and a coquette’s archness.  It said much rather for the straight, fair, sunlit instincts of the untaught nature that Cigarette had gleaned, even out of such a life, two virtues that she would have held by to the death, if tried:  a truthfulness that would have scorned a lie as only fit for cowards, and a loyalty that cleaved to France as a religion.

Cecil thought that a gallant boy was spoiled in this eighteen-year-old brunette of a campaigner; he might have gone further, and said that a hero was lost.

“Voila!” said Cigarette between her little teeth.

She stood in the glittering Algerine night, brilliant with a million stars, and balmy with a million flowers, before the bronze trellised gate of the villa on the Sahel, where Chateauroy, when he was not on active service—­which chanced rarely, for he was one of the finest soldiers and most daring chiefs in Africa—­indemnified himself, with the magnificence that his private fortune enabled him to enjoy, for the unsparing exertions and the rugged privations that he always shared willingly with the lowest of his soldiers.  It was the grandest trait in the man’s character that he utterly scorned the effeminacy with which many commanders provided for their table, their comfort, and their gratification while campaigning, and would commonly neither take himself nor allow to his officers any more indulgence on the march than his troopers themselves enjoyed.  But his villa on the Sahel was a miniature palace; it had formerly been the harem of a great Rais, and the gardens were as enchanting as the interior was—­if something florid, still as elegant as Paris art and Paris luxury could make it; for ferocious as the Black Hawk was in war, and well as he loved the chase and the slaughter, he did not disdain, when he had whetted beak and talons to satiety, to smooth his ruffled plumage in downy nests and under caressing hands.