“Nay, she is unjust to herself,” murmured Leon Ramon.  “She gave up the fete to do this mercy—­it has been a great one.  She is more generous than she will ever allow.  Here, Cigarette, look at these scarlet rosebuds; they are like your bright cheeks.  Will you have them?  I have nothing else to give.”

“Rosebuds!” echoed Cigarette, with supreme scorn.  “Rosebuds for me?  I know no rose but the red of the tricolor; and I could not tell a weed from a flower.  Besides, I told Miou-Matou just now, if my children do as I tell them, they will not take a leaf or a peach-stone from this grande dame—­how does she call herself?—­Mme. Corona d’Amague!”

Cecil looked up quickly:  “Why not?”

Cigarette flashed on him her brilliant, brown eyes with a fire that amazed him.

“Because we are soldiers, not paupers!”

“Surely; but—­”

“And it is not for the silver pheasants, who have done nothing to deserve their life but lain in nests of cotton wool, and eaten grain that others sow and shell for them, and spread their shining plumage in a sun that never clouds above their heads, to insult, with the insolence of their ‘pity’ and their ‘charity,’ the heroes of France, who perish as they have lived, for their Country and their Flag!”

It was a superb peroration!  If the hapless flowers lying there had been a cartel of outrage to the concrete majesty of the French Army, the Army’s champion could not have spoken with more impassioned force and scorn.

Cecil laughed slightly; but he answered, with a certain annoyance: 

“There is no ‘insolence’ here; no question of it.  Mme. la Princesse desired to offer some gift to the soldiers of Algiers; I suggested to her that to increase the scant comforts of the hospital, and gladden the weary eyes of sick men with beauties that the Executive never dreams of bestowing, would be the most merciful and acceptable mode of exercising her kindness.  If blame there be in the matter, it is mine.”

In defending the generosity of what he knew to be a genuine and sincere wish to gratify his comrades, he betrayed what he did not intend to have revealed, namely, the conversation that had passed between himself and the Spanish Princesse.  Cigarette caught at the inference with the quickness of her lightning-like thought.

“Oh, ha!  So it is she!”

There was a whole world of emphasis, scorn, meaning, wrath, comprehension, and irony in the four monosyllables; the dying man looked at her with languid wonder.

“She?  Who?  What story goes with these roses?”

“None,” said Cecil, with the same inflection of annoyance in his voice; to have his passing encounter with this beautiful patrician pass into a barrack canard, through the unsparing jests of the soldiery around him, was a prospect very unwelcome to him.  “None whatever.  A generous thoughtfulness for our common necessities as soldiers—­”