She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable passionate shame.  Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day; and now he—­he whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known—­he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had roused it!  To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.

Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and loyal fealty that is inborn with such natures as hers.  To have betrayed what he had trusted to her, because she was neglected and wounded by him, would have been a feminine baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette would have been totally incapable.  Her revenge might be fierce, and rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be stealing and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman.

Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the secret with which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only studied with interest and keenness the face and the words of this man whom he had loved, and from whom he had fled as criminals flee from their accusers.

“What is your name?” she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the officers of Chasseurs were entertaining him.

“Well—­some call me Seraph.”

“Ah! you have petite names, then, in Albion?  I should have though she was too somber and too stiff for them.  Besides?”

“Lyonnesse.”

“What a droll name!  What are you?”

“A soldier.”

“Good!  What grade?”

“A Colonel of Guards.”

Cigarette gave a little whistle to herself; she remembered that a Marshal of France had once said of a certain Chasseur, “He has the seat of the English Guards.”

“My pretty catechist, M. le Duc does not tell you his title,” cried one of the officers.

Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head.

“Ouf!  Titles are nothing to me.  I am a child of the People.  So you are a Duke, are you, M. le Seraph?  Well, that is not much, to my thinking.  Bah! there is Fialin made a Duke in Paris, and there are aristocrats here wearing privates’ uniforms, and littering down their own horses.  Bah!  Have you that sort of thing in Albion?”

“Attorneys throned on high, and gentlemen glad to sweep crossings?  Oh, yes!” laughed her interlocutor.  “But you speak of aristocrats in your ranks—­that reminds me.  Have you not in this corps a soldier called Louis Victor?”

He had turned as he spoke to one of the officers, who answered him in the affirmative; while Cigarette listened with all her curiosity and all her interest, that needed a deeper name, heightened and tight-strung.