The Englishman looked at her with astonishment that was mingled with a vivid sense of intense annoyance and irritated pride, that the name he cherished closest should be thus brought in, at a camp dinner, on the lips of a vivandiere and in connection with a trooper of Chasseurs.

“I do not understand your indignation, mademoiselle,” he said, with an impatient stroke to his beard.  “There is no occasion for it.  Mme. Corona d’Amague, my sister,” he continued, to the officers present, “became accidentally acquainted with the skill at sculpture of this Corporal of yours; he appeared to her a man of much refinement and good breeding.  She chanced to name him to me, and feeling some pity—­”

“M. le Duc!” cried the ringing voice of Cigarette, loud and startling as a bugle-note, while she stood like a little lioness, flushed with the draughts of champagne and with the warmth of wrath at once jealous and generous, “keep your compassion until it is asked of you.  No soldier of France needs it; that I promise you.  I know this man that you talk of ‘pitying.’  Well, I saw him at Zaraila three weeks ago; he had drawn up his men to die with them rather than surrender and yield up the guidon; I dragged him half dead, when the field was won, from under his horse, and his first conscious act was to give the drink that I brought him to a wretch who had thieved from him.  Our life here is hell upon earth to such as he, yet none ever heard a lament wrung out of him; he is gone to the chances of death to-night as most men go to their mistresses’ kisses; he is a soldier Napoleon would have honored.  Such a one is not to have the patronage of a Milady Corona, nor the pity of a stranger of England.  Let the first respect him; let the last imitate him!”

And Cigarette, having pronounced her defense and her eulogy with the vibrating eloquence of some orator from a tribune, threw her champagne goblet down with a crash, and, breaking through the arms outstretched to detain her, forced her way out despite them, and left her hosts alone in their lighted tent.

“C’est Cigarette!” said the Chef d’Escadron, with a shrug of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities.

“A strange little Amazon!” said their guest.  “Is she in love with this Victor, that I have offended her so much with his name?”

The Major shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know that, monsieur,” answered one.  “She will defend a man in his absence, and rate him to his face most soundly.  Cigarette whirls about like a little paper windmill, just as the breeze blows; but, as the windmill never leaves its stick, so she is always constant to the Tricolor.”

Their guest said little more on the subject; in his own thoughts he was bitterly resentful that, by the mention of this Chasseur’s fortunes, he should have brought in the name he loved so well—­the purest, fairest, haughtiest name in Europe—­into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp dinner.