one slumbered in ignorance near her, the other had gone out to the close peril of death, lest the eyes of his friend recognize his face and read his secret.  It troubled her, it weighed on her, it smote her with a pang.  It might be that now, even now—­this very moment, while her gaze watched the dusky shadows of the night chase one another along the dreary plains—­a shot might have struck down this life that had been stripped of name and fame and country; even now all might be over!

And Cigarette felt a cold, sickly shudder seize her that never before, at death or danger, had chilled the warm, swift current of her bright French blood.  In bitter scorn at herself, she muttered hot oaths between her pretty teeth.

Mere de Dieu! he had touched her lips as carelessly as her own kiss would have touched the rose-bud, waxen petals of a cluster of oleander-blossoms; and she cared for him still!

While the Seraph slept dreamlessly, with the tents of the French camp around him, and the sleepless eyes of Cigarette watched afar off the dim, distant forms of the vedettes as they circled slowly round at their outpost duty—­eight leagues off, through a vast desert of shadow and silence, the two horsemen swept swiftly on.  Not a word had passed between them; they rode close together in unbroken stillness; they were scarcely visible to each other for there was no moon, and storm-clouds obscured the skies.  Now and then their horses’ hoofs struck fire from a flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the darkness; often not even the sound of their gallop was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil.

Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril.  No frowning ledge of rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might serve as the barricade behind which some foe lurked; no knot of cypress-shrubs, black even on that black sheet of shadow, but might be pierced with the steel tubes of leveled, waiting muskets.

Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what was to them a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the invader, the predatory tribes had broken out into a revolt which the rout of Zaraila, heavy blow though it had been to them, had by no means ended.  They were still in arms, infesting the country everywhere southward; defying regular pursuit, impervious to regular attacks; carrying on the harassing guerilla warfare at which they were such adepts.  And causing thus to their Frankish foe more irritation and more loss than decisive engagements would have produced.  They feared nothing, had nothing to lose, and could subsist almost upon nothing.  They might be driven into the desert, they might even be exterminated after long pursuit; but they would never be vanquished.  And they were scattered now far and wide over the country; every cave might shelter, every ravine might inclose them; they appeared here, they appeared there; they swooped down on a convoy, they carried sword and flame into a settlement, they darted like a flight of hawks upon a foraging party, they picked off any vedette, as he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight; and every yard of the sixty miles which the two gray chargers of the Chasseurs d’Afrique must cover ere their service was done was as rife with death as though its course lay over the volcanic line of an earthquake or a hollow, mined and sprung.