The mood did not last.  She was too brave, too fiery, too dauntless, too untamed.  The dusky, angry flush upon her face grew deeper, and the passion gathered more stormily in her eyes, while she felt the pistol butts in her sash, and laughed low to herself, where she lay stretched under her flowery nest.

“Bah! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of these,” she thought, with her old disdain, “and would stand fire no more than a gazelle!  They are only made for summer-day weather, those dainty, gorgeous, silver pheasants.  A breath of war, a touch of tempest, would soon beat them down—­crash!—­with all their proud crests drooping!”

Like many another Cigarette underrated what she had no knowledge of, and depreciated an antagonist the measure of whose fence she had no power to gauge.

Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still as a mouse, moving nearer and nearer, though none would have told that so much as a lizard even stirred under the blossoms, until her ear, quick and unerring as an Indian’s, could detect the sense of the words spoken by that group, which so aroused all the hot ire of her warrior’s soul and her democrat’s impatience.  Chateauroy himself was bending his fine, dark head toward the patrician on whom her instinct had fastened her hatred.

“You expressed your wish to see my Corporal’s little sculptures again, madame,” he was murmuring now, as Cigarette got close enough under her flower shadows to catch the sense of the words.  “To hear was to obey with me.  He waits your commands yonder.”

Cecil obeyed the lackey who crossed the lawn, passed up the stairs, and stood before his Colonel, giving the salute; the shade of some acacias still fell across him, while the party he fronted were in all the glow of a full Algerian moon and of the thousand lamps among the belt of flowers and trees.  Cigarette gave a sharp, deep-drawn breath, and lay as mute and motionless as she had done before then, among the rushes of some dried brook’s bed, scanning a hostile camp, when the fate of a handful of French troops had rested on her surety and her caution.

Chateauroy spoke with a carelessness as of a man to a dog, turning to his Corporal.

“Victor, Mme. la Princesse honors you with the desire to see your toys again.  Spread them out.”

The savage authority of his general speech was softened for sake of his guest’s presence, but there was a covert tone in the words that made Cigarette murmur to herself: 

“If he forget his promise, I will forgive him!”