“Nor do you know how many shadows checker that light which you envy!  But I have said; it is useless for me to argue these questions with you.  You commence with a hatred of a class; all justice is over wherever that element enters.  If I were what you think, I should bid you leave my presence which you have entered so rudely.  I do not desire to do that.  I am sure that the heroine of Zaraila has something nobler in her than mere malignity against a person who can never have injured her; and I would endure her insolence for the sake of awakening her justice.  A virtue, that was so great in her at noon, cannot be utterly dead at nightfall.”

Cigarette’s fearless eyes drooped under the gaze of those bent so searchingly, yet so gently, upon her; but only for a moment.  She raised them afresh with their old dauntless frankness.

“Dieu! you shall never say you wanted justice and truth from a French soldier, and failed to get them!  I hate you, never mind why—­I do, though you never harmed me.  I came here for two reasons:  one, because I wanted to look at you close—­you are not like anything that I ever saw; the other, because I wanted to wound you, to hurt you, to outrage you, if I could find a way how.  And you will not let me do it.  I do not know what it is in you.”

In all her courted life, the great lady had had no truer homage than lay in that irate, reluctant wonder of this fiery foe.

She smiled slightly.

“My poor child, it is rather something in yourself—­a native nobility that will not allow you to be as unjust and as insolent as your soul desires—­”

Cigarette gave a movement of intolerable impatience.

“Pardieu!  Do not pity me, or I shall give you a taste of my ‘insolence’ in earnest!  You may be a sovereign grand dame everywhere else, but you can carry no terror with you for me, I promise you!”

“I do not seek to do so.  If I did not feel interest in you, do you suppose I should suffer for a moment the ignorant rudeness of an ill-bred child?  You fail in the tact, as in the courtesy, that belong to your nation.”

The rebuke was gentle, but it was all the more severe for its very serenity.  It cut Cigarette to the quick; it covered her with an overwhelming sense of mortification and of failure.  She was too keen and too just, despite all her vanity, not to feel that she had deserved the condemnation, and not to know that her opponent had all the advantage and all the justice on her side.  She had done nothing by coming here; nothing except to appear as an insolent and wayward child before her superb rival, and to feel a very anguish of inferiority before the grace, the calm, the beauty, the nameless, potent charm of this woman, whom she had intended to humiliate and injure!

The inborn truth within her, the native generosity and candor that soon or late always overruled every other element in the Little One, conquered her now.  She dashed down her Cross on the ground, and trod passionately on the decoration she adored.