Yet all she saw was a small and brilliant group sauntering to and fro before the open windows, after dinner, listening to the bands, which, through dinner, had played to them, and laughing low and softly; and, at some distance from them, beneath the shade of a cedar, the figure of a Corporal of Chasseurs,—­calm, erect, motionless,—­as though he were the figure of a soldier cast in bronze.  The scene was simple enough, though very picturesque; but it told, by its vivid force of contrast, a whole history to Cigarette.

“A true soldier!” she muttered, where she lay among the rhododendrons, while her eyes grew very soft, as she gave the highest word of praise that her whole range of language held.  “A true soldier!  How he keeps his promise!  But it must be bitter!”

She looked a while, very wistfully, at the Chasseur, where he stood under the Lebanon boughs; then her glance swept bright as a hawk’s over the terrace, and lighted with a prescient hatred on the central form of all—­a woman’s.  There were two other great ladies there; but she passed them, and darted with unerring instinct on that proud, fair, patrician head, with its haughty, stag-like carriage and the crown of its golden hair.

Cigarette had seen grand dames by the thousand, though never very close; seen them in Paris when they came to look on at a grand review; seen them in their court attire, when the Guides had filled the Carrousel on some palace ball-night, and lined the Court des Princes, and she had bewitched the officers of the guard into letting her pass in to see the pageantry.  But she had never felt for those grandes dames anything save a considerably contemptuous indifference.  She had looked on them pretty much as a war-worn, powder-tried veteran looks on the curled dandy of some fashionable, home-staying corps.  She had never realized the difference betwixt them and herself, save in so far as she thought them useless butterflies, worth nothing at all, and laughed as she triumphantly remembered how she could shoot a man and break in a colt.

Now, for the first time, the sight of one of those aristocrats smote her with a keen, hot sting of heart-burning jealousy.  Now, for the fist time, the little Friend of the Flag looked at all the nameless graces of rank with an envy that her sunny, gladsome, generous nature had never before been touched with—­with a sudden perception, quick as thought, bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what this womanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might be in its highest and purest shape.

“If those are the women that he knew before he came here, I do not wonder that he never cared to watch even my bamboula,” was the latent, unacknowledged thought that was so cruel to her:  the consciousness—­which forced itself in on her, while her eyes jealously followed the perfect grace of the one in whom instinct had found her rival—­that, while she had been so proud of her recklessness, and her devilry, and her trooper’s slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she had only been something very worthless, something very lightly held by those who liked her for a ribald jest, and a dance, and a Spahis’ supper of headlong riot and drunken mirth.