The tone touched him—­made him think less and less of her as a dare-devil boy, as a reckless child-soldier, and more of her as what she was, than he had done before; he touched her almost caressingly.

“Pauvre enfant!  I hope that day will be very distant from you.  And yet—­how bravely you risked death for me just now!”

Cigarette, though accustomed to the lawless loves of the camp, flushed ever so slightly at the mere caress of his hand.

“I risked nothing!” she said rapidly.  “As for death—­when it comes, it comes.  Every soldier carries it in his wallet, and it may jump out on him any minute.  I would rather die young than grow old.  Age is nothing else but death that is conscious.”

“Where do you get your wisdom, little one?”

“Wisdom?  Bah! living is learning.  Some people go through life with their eyes shut, and then grumble there is nothing to see in it!  Well—­you want that Arab buried?  What a fancy!  Look you, then; stay by him, since you are so fond of him, and I will go and send some men to you with a stretcher to carry him down to the town.  As for reporting, leave that to me.  I shall tell them I left you on guard.  That will square things if you are late at the barrack.”

“But that will give you so much trouble, Cigarette.”

“Trouble?  Morbleu!  Do you think I am like that silver pheasant yonder?  Lend me your horse, and I shall be in the town in ten minutes!”

She vaulted, as she spoke, into the saddle; he laid his hand on the bridle and stopped her.

“Wait!  I have not thanked you half enough, my brave little champion.  How am I to show you my gratitude?”

For a moment the bright, brown, changeful face, that could look so fiercely scornful, so sunnily radiant, so tempestuously passionate, and so tenderly childlike, in almost the same moment, grew warm as the warm suns that had given their fire to her veins; she glanced at him almost shyly, while the moonlight slept lustrously in the dark softness of her eyes; there was an intense allurement in her in that moment—­the allurement of a woman’s loveliness, bitterly as she disdained a woman’s charms.  It might have told him, more plainly than words, how best he could reward her for the shot that had saved him; yet, though a man on whom such beguilement usually worked only too easily and too often, it did not now touch him.  He was grateful to her, but, despite himself, he was cold to her; despite himself, the life which that little hand that he held had taken so lightly made it the hand of a comrade to be grasped in alliance, but never the hand of a mistress to steal to his lips and to lie in his breast.

Her rapid and unerring instinct made her feel that keenly and instantly; she had seen too much passion not to know when it was absent.  The warmth passed off her face, her teeth clinched; she shook the bridle out of his hold.

“Take gratitude to the silver pheasant there!  She will value fine words; I set no count on them.  I did no more for you than I have done scores of times for my Spahis.  Ask them how many I have shot with my own hand!”