“Beau Victor!  You took their parts well,” said a voice behind him, as Cigarette vaulted over a pile of knapsacks and stood in the glow of the fire, with a little pipe in her pretty rosebud mouth and her cap set daintily on one side of her curls.

He looked up, and smiled.

“Not so well as your own clever tongue would have done.  Words are not my weapons.”

“No!  You are as silent as the grave commonly; but when you do speak, you speak well,” said the vivandiere condescendingly.  “I hate silence myself!  Thoughts are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round, round, round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they keep little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest.”

With which metaphor Cigarette blew a cloud of smoke into the night air, looking the prettiest little genre picture in the ruddy firelight that ever was painted on such a background of wavering shadow and undulating flame.

“Will your allegory hold good, petite?” smiled Cecil, thinking but little of his answer or of his companion, of whose service to him he remained utterly ignorant.  “I fancy speech is the chaff most generally, little better.  So, they talk of you for the Cross?  No soldier ever, of a surety, more greatly deserved it.”

Her eyes gleamed with a luster like the African planets above her; her face caught all the fire, the light, the illumination of the flames flashing near her.

“I did nothing,” she said curtly.  “Any man on the field would have done the same.”

“That is easy to say; not so easy to prove.  In all great events there may be the same strength, courage, and desire to act greatly in those who follow as in the one that leads; but it is only in that one that there is also the daring to originate, the genius to seize aright the moment of action and of success.”

Cigarette was a little hero; she was, moreover, a little desperado; but she was a child in years and a woman at heart, valiant and ruthless young soldier though she might be.  She colored all over her mignonne face at the words of eulogy from this man whom she had told herself she hated; her eyes filled; her lips trembled.

“It was nothing” she said softly, under her breath.  “I would die twenty deaths for France.”

He looked at her, and for the hour understood her aright; he saw that there was the love for her country and the power of sacrifice in this gay-plumaged and capricious little hawk of the desert.

“You have a noble nature, Cigarette,” he said, with an earnest regard at her.  “My poor child, if only——­” He paused.  He was thinking what it was hard to say to her—­if only the accidents of her life had been different, what beauty, race, and genius might have been developed out of the untamed, untutored, inconsequent, but glorious nature of the child-warrior.

As by a fate, unconsciously his pity embittered all the delight his praise had given, and this implied regret for her stung her as the rend of the spur a young Arab colt—­stung her inwardly into cruel wrath and pain; outwardly into irony, deviltry, and contemptuous retort.