“I disgrace it the first day I wear it!  You are right, though I hate you, and you are as beautiful as a sorceress!  There is no wonder he loves you!”

“He!  Who?”

There was a colder and more utterly amazed hauteur in the interrogation than had come into her voice throughout the interview, yet on her fair face a faint warmth rose.

The words were out, and Cigarette was reckless what she said; almost unconscious, indeed, in the violence of the many emotions in her.

“The man who carves the toys you give your dog to break!” she answered bitterly.  “Dieu de Dieu! he loves you.  When he was down with his wounds after Zaraila, he said so; but he never knew what he said, and he never knew that I heard him.  You are like the women of his old world; though through you he got treated like a dog, he loves you!”

“Of whom do you venture to speak?”

The cold, calm dignity of the question, whose very tone was a rebuke, came strangely after the violent audacity of Cigarette’s speech.

“Sacre bleu!  Of him, I tell you, who was made to bring his wares to you like a hawker.  And you think it insult, I will warrant!—­insult for a soldier who has nothing but his courage, and his endurance, and his heroism under suffering to ennoble him, to dare to love Mme. la Princesse Corona!  I think otherwise.  I think that Mme. la Princesse Corona never had a love of so much honor, though she has had princes and nobles and all the men of her rank, no doubt, at her feet, through that beauty that is like a spell!”

Hurried headlong by her own vehemence, and her own hatred for her rival, which drove her to magnify the worth of the passion of which she was so jealous, that she might lessen, if she could, the pride of her on whom it was lavished, she never paused to care what she said, or heed what its consequences might become.  She felt incensed, amazed, irritated, to see no trace of any emotion come on her hearer’s face; the hot, impetuous, expansive, untrained nature underrated the power for self-command of the Order she so blindly hated.

“You speak idly and at random, like the child you are,” the grande dame answered her with chill, contemptuous rebuke.  “I do not imagine that the person you allude to made you his confidante in such a matter?”

“He!” retorted Cigarette.  “He belongs to your class, Milady.  He is as silent as the grave.  You might kill him, and he would never show it hurt.  I only know what he muttered in his fever.”

“When you attended him?”

“Not I!” cried Cigarette, who saw for the first time that she was betraying herself.  “He lay in the scullion’s tent where I was; that was all; and he was delirious with the shot-wounds.  Men often are—­”