He was not dead; he was not even in peril of death.  She knew enough of medical lore to know that it was but the insensibility of exhaustion and suffocation; and she did not care that he should waken.  She dropped her head over him, moving her hand softly among the masses of his curls, and watching the quickening beatings of his heart under the bare, strong nerves.  Her face grew tender, and warm, and eager, and melting with a marvelous change of passionate hues.  She had all the ardor of southern blood; without a wish he had wakened in her a love that grew daily and hourly, though she would not acknowledge it.  She loved to see him lie there as though he were asleep, to cheat herself into the fancy that she watched his rest to wake it with a kiss on his lips.  In that unconsciousness, in that abandonment, he seemed wholly her own; passion which she could not have analyzed made her bend above him with a half-fierce, half-dreamy delight in that solitary possession of his beauty, of his life.

The restless movements of little Flick-Flack detached a piece of twine passed round his favorite’s throat; the glitter of gold arrested Cigarette’s eyes.  She caught what the poodle’s impatient caress had broken from the string.  It was a small, blue-enamel medallion bonbon-box, with a hole through it by which it had been slung—­a tiny toy once costly, now tarnished, for it had been carried through many rough scenes and many years of hardship; had been bent by blows struck at the breast against which it rested, and was clotted now with blood.  Inside it was a woman’s ring, of sapphires and opals.

She looked at both close, in the glow of the setting sun; then passed the string through and fastened the box afresh.  It was a mere trifle, but it sufficed to banish her dream; to arouse her to contemptuous, impatient bitterness with that new weakness that had for the hour broken her down to the level of this feverish folly.  He was beautiful—­yes!  She could not bring herself to hate him; she could not help the brimming tears blinding her eyes when she looked at him, stretched senseless thus.  But he was wedded to his past; that toy in his breast, whatever it might be, whatever tale might cling to it, was sweeter to him than her lips would ever be.  Bah! there were better men than he; why had she not let him lie and die as he might, under the pile of dead?

Bah! she could have killed herself for her folly!  She, who had scores of lovers, from princes, to piou-pious, and never had a heartache for one of them, to go and care for a silent “ci-devant,” who had never even noticed that her eyes had any brightness or her face had any charm!

“You deserve to be shot—­you!” said Cigarette, fiercely abusing herself as she put his head off her lap, and rose abruptly and shouted to a Tringlo, who was at some distance searching for the wounded.  “Here is a Chasse-Marais with some breath in him,” she said curtly, as the man with his mule-cart and his sad burden of half-dead, moaning, writhing frames drew near to her summons.  “Put him in.  Soldiers cost too much training to waste them on jackals and kites, if one can help it.  Lift him up—­quick!”