Passing one of the cafes, a favorite resort of the officers of his own regiment, he saw Cigarette.  A sheaf of blue, and white, and scarlet lights flashed with tongues of golden flame over her head, and a great tricolor flag, with the brass eagle above it, was hanging in the still, hot air from the balcony from which she leaned.  Her tunic-skirt was full of bonbons and crackers that she was flinging down among the crowd while she sang; stopping every now and then to exchange some passage of gaulois wit with them that made her hearers scream with laughter, while behind her was a throng of young officers drinking champagne, eating ices, and smoking; echoing her songs and her satires with enthusiastic voices and stamps of their spurred bootheels.  As he glanced upward, she looked literally in a blaze of luminance, and the wild, mellow tones of her voice, ringing out sounded like a mockery of that dying-bed beside which they had both so late stood together.

“She has the playfulness of the young leopard, and the cruelty,” he thought, with a sense of disgust; forgetting that she did not know what he knew, and that, if Cigarette had waited to laugh until death had passed by, she would have never laughed all her life through, in the battalions of Africa.

She saw him, as he went beneath her balcony; and she sung all the louder, she flung her sweetmeat missiles with reckless force; she launched bolts of tenfold more audacious raillery at the delighted mob below.  Cigarette was “bon soldat”; when she was wounded, she wound her scarf round the nerve that ached, and only laughed the gayer.

And he did her that injustice which the best among us are apt to do to those whom we do not feel interest enough in to study with that closeness which can alone give comprehension of the intricate and complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so marvelously involved, of human nature.

He thought her a little leopard, in her vivacious play and her inborn bloodthirstiness.

Well, the little leopard of France played recklessly enough that evening.  Algiers was en fete, and Cigarette was sparkling over the whole of the town like a humming-bird or a firefly—­here and there, and everywhere, in a thousand places at once, as it seemed; staying long with none, making music and mirth with all.  Waltzing like a thing possessed, pelting her lovers with a tempest storm of dragees, standing on the head of a gigantic Spahi en tableau amid a shower of fireworks, improvising slang songs, and chorused by a hundred lusty lungs that yelled the burden in riotous glee as furiously as they were accustomed to shout “En avant!” in assault and in charge, Cigarette made amends to herself at night for her vain self-sacrifice of the fete-day.