In another instant she was away like a sirocco; a whirlwind of dust, that rose in the moonlight, marking her flight as she rode full gallop to Algiers.

“A kitten with the tigress in her,” thought Cecil, as he seated himself on a broken pile of stone to keep his vigil over the dead Arab.  It was not that he was callous to the generous nature of the little Friend of the Flag, or that he was insensible either to the courage that beat so dauntlessly in her pulses, or to the piquant, picturesque grace that accompanied even her wildest actions; but she had nothing of her sex’s charm for him.  He thought of her rather as a young soldier than as a young girl.  She amused him as a wayward, bright, mischievous, audacious boy might have done; but she had no other interest for him.  He had given her little attention; a waltz, a cigar, a passing jest, were all he had bestowed on the little lionne of the Spahis corps; and the deepest sentiment she had ever awakened in him was an involuntary pity—­pity for this flower which blossomed on the polluted field of war, and under the poison-dropping branches of lawless crime.  A flower, bright-hued and sun-fed, glancing with the dews of youth now, when it had just unclosed, in all its earliest beauty, but already soiled and tainted by the bed from which it sprang, and doomed to be swept away with time, scentless and loveless, down the rapid, noxious current of that broad, black stream of vice on which it now floated so heedlessly.

Even now his thoughts drifted from her almost before the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died where he sat on a loose pile of stones, with the lifeless limbs of the Arab at his feet.

“Who was it in my old life that she is like?” he was musing.  It was the deep-blue, dreaming haughty eyes of the Princesse that he was bringing back to memory, not the brown, mignon face that had been so late close to his in the light of the moon.

Meanwhile, on his good gray, Cigarette rode like a true Chasseur herself.  She was used to the saddle, and would ride a wild desert colt without stirrup or bridle; balancing her supple form now on one foot, now on the other, on the animal’s naked back, while they flew at full speed.  Not so fantastically, but full as speedily, she dashed down into the city, scattering all she met with right and left, till she rode straight up to the barracks of the Chasseurs d’Afrique.  At the entrance, as she reined up, she saw the very person she wanted, and signed him to her as carelessly as if he were a conscript instead of that powerful officer, Francois Vireflau, captain and adjutant.

“Hola!” she cried, as she signaled him; Cigarette was privileged all through the army.  “Adjutant Vireflau, I come to tell you a good story for your folios.  There is your Corporal there—­le beau Victor—­has been attacked by four drunken dogs of Arbicos, dead-drunk, and four against one.  He fought them superbly, but he would only parry, not thrust, because he knows