She did not know why she did it—­he was nothing to her—­and yet she kept herself wide awake through the dark autumn night, lest he should sigh or stir and she not hear him.

“I have saved his life twice,” she thought, looking at him; “beware of the third time, they say!”

He moved restlessly, and she went to him.  His face was flushed now; his breath came rapidly and shortly; there was some fever on him.  The linen was displaced from his wounds; she dipped it again in water, and laid the cooled bands on them.  “Ah, bah!  If I were not unsexed enough for this, how would it be with you now?” she said in her teeth.  He tossed wearily to and fro; detached words caught her ear as he muttered them.

“Let it be, let it be—­he is welcome!  How could I prove it at his cost?  I saved him—­I could do that.  It was not much——­”

She listened with intent anxiety to hear the other whispers ending the sentence, but they were stifled and broken.

“Tiens!” she murmured below her breath.  “It is for some other he has ruined himself.”

She could not catch the words that followed.  They were in an unknown language to her, for she knew nothing of English, and they poured fast and obscure from his lips as he moved in feverish unrest; the wine that had saved him from exhaustion inflaming his brain in his sleep.  Now and then French phrases crossed the English ones; she leaned down to seize their meaning till her cheek was against his forehead, till her lips touched his hair; and at that half caress her heart beat, her face flushed, her mouth trembled with a too vivid joy, with an impulse, half fear and half longing, that had never so moved her before.

“If I had my birthright,” he muttered in her own tongue.  “If I had it—­would she look so cold then?  She might love me—­women used once.  O God! if she had not looked on me, I had never known all I had lost!”

Cigarette started as if a knife had stabbed her, and sprang up from her rest beside him.

“She—­she—­always she!” she muttered fiercely, while her face grew duskily scarlet in the fire-glow of the tent; and she went slowly away, back to the low wood fire.

This was to be ever her reward!

Her eyes glistened and flashed with the fiery, vengeful passions of her hot and jealous instincts.  Cigarette had in her the violence, as she had the nobility, of a grand nature that has gone wholly untutored and unguided; and she had the power of southern vengeance in her, though she had also the swift temper.  It was bitter, beyond any other bitterness that could have wounded her, for the spoilt, victorious, imperious, little empress of the Army of Algeria to feel that, though she had given his life twice back to the man, she was less to him than the tiny white dog that nestled in his breast; that she, who never before had endured a slight, or known what neglect could mean, gave care, and pity, and aid, and even tenderness, to one whose only thought was for a woman who had accorded him nothing but a few chill syllables of haughty condescension!