Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine-leaves a cold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him; the delicious coolness and freshness in that parching, noontide heat stilled the convulsion; his eyes thanked her, though his lips could not; he lay panting, exhausted, but relieved; and she—­thoughtfully for her—­slid herself down on the floor, and began singing low and sweetly, as a fairy might sing on the raft of a water-lily leaf.  She sung quadriales, to be sure, Beranger’s songs and odes of the camp; for she knew of no hymn but the “Marseillaise,” and her chants were all chants like the “Laus Veneris.”  But the voice that gave them was pure as the voice of a thrush in the spring, and the cadence of its music was so silvery sweet that it soothed like a spell all the fever-racked brains, all the pain-tortured spirits.

“Ah, that is sweet,” murmured the dying man.  “It is like the brooks—­like the birds—­like the winds in the leaves.”

He was but half conscious; but the lulling of that gliding voice brought him peace.  And Cigarette sung on, only moving to reach him some fresh touch of ice, while time traveled on, and the first afternoon shadows crept across the bare floor.  Every now and then, dimly through the openings of the windows, came a distant roll of drums, a burst of military music, an echo of the laughter of a crowd; and then her head went up eagerly, an impatient shade swept across her expressive face.

It was a fete-day in Algiers; there were flags and banners fluttering from the houses; there were Arab races and Arab maneuvers; there was a review of troops for some foreign general; there were all the mirth and the mischief that she loved, and that never went on without her; and she knew well enough that from mouth to mouth there was sure to be asking, “Mais ou done est Cigarette?” Cigarette, who was the Generalissima of Africa!

But still she never moved; though all her vivacious life was longing to be out and in their midst, on the back of a desert horse, on the head of a huge drum, perched on the iron support of a high-hung lantern, standing on a cannon while the Horse Artillery swept full gallop, firing down a volley of argot on the hot homage of a hundred lovers, drinking creamy liqueurs and filling her pockets with bonbons from handsome subalterns and aids-de-camp, doing as she had done ever since she could remember her first rataplan.  But she never moved.  She knew that in the general gala these sick-beds would be left more deserted and less soothed than ever.  She knew, too, that it was for the sake of this man, lying dying here from the lunge of a Bedouin lance through his lungs, that the ivory wreaths and crosses and statuettes had been sold.

And Cigarette had done more than this ere now many a time for her “children.”