Cigarette nodded assent; the sullen fire-glow still burned in her eyes, but she succumbed to the resistless influence which the serenity, the patience, and the dignity of this woman had over her.  She was studying Venetia Corona all this while with the keen, rapid perceptions of envy and of jealousy; studying her features, her form, her dress, her attitude, all the many various and intangible marks of birth and breeding which were so new to her, and which made her rival seem so strange, so dazzling, so marvelous a sorceress to her; and all the while the sense of her own inferiority, her own worthlessness, her own boldness, her own debasement was growing upon her, eating, sharply into the metal of her vanity and her pride, humiliating her unbearably, yet making her heart ache with a sad, pathetic pity for herself.

“He is of your Order, then?” she asked abruptly.

“He was—­yes.”

“Oh, ha!” cried Cigarette, with her old irony.  “Then he must be always, mustn’t he?  You think too much of your blue blood, you patricians, to fancy it can lose its royalty, whether it run under a King’s purple or a Roumi’s canvas shirt.  Blood tells, they say!  Well, perhaps it does.  Some say my father was a Prince of France—­maybe!  So, he is of your Order?  Bah!  I knew that the first day I saw his hands.  Do you want me to tell you why he lives among us, buried like this?”

“Not if you violate any confidence to do so.”

“Pardieu!  He makes no confidence, I promise you.  Not ten words will Monsieur say, if he can help it, about anything.  He is as silent as a lama.  But we learn things without being told in camp; and I know well enough he is here to save someone else, in someone’s place; it is a sacrifice, look you, that nails him down to this martyrdom.”

Her auditor was silent; she thought as the vivandiere thought, but the pride in her, the natural reticence and reserve of her class, made her shrink from discussing the history of one whom she knew—­shrink from having any argument on his past or future with a saucy, rough, fiery young camp-follower, who had broken thus unceremoniously on her privacy.  Yet she needed greatly to be able to trust Cigarette; the child was the only means through which she could send him a warning that must be sent; and there were a bravery and a truth in her which attracted the “aristocrat,” to whom she was so singular and novel a rarity as though she were some young savage of desert western isles.

“Look you, Milady,” said Cigarette, half sullenly, half passionately, for the words were wrenched out of her generosity, and choked her in their utterance, “that man suffers; his life here is a hell upon earth—­I don’t mean for the danger, he is bon soldat; but for the indignity, the subordination, the license, the brutality, the tyranny.  He is as if he were chained to the galleys.  He never says anything.  Oh, no! he is of your kind you know!  But he suffers.  Mort de Dieu! he suffers.  Now, if you be his friend, can you do nothing for him?  Can you ransom him in no way?  Can you go away out of Africa and leave him in this living death to get killed and thrust into the sand, like his comrade the other day?”