“Forgive me, my dear child, if I have seemed without sympathy in all your honors,” he said gently, as he laid his hand on her shoulder.  “Believe me, it was unintentional.  No one knows better than I how richly you deserved them; no one rejoices more that you should have received them.”

The very gentleness of the apology stung her like a scorpion; she shook herself roughly out of his hold.

“Point de phrases!  All the army is at my back; do you think I cannot do without you?  Sympathy too!  Bah!  We don’t know those fine words in camp.  You are wanted, I tell you—­go!”

“But where?”

“To your Silver Pheasant yonder—­go!”

“Who?  I do not—­”

“Dame!  Can you not understand?  Milady wants to see you; I told her I would send you to her.  You can use your dainty sentences with her; she is of your Order!”

“What! she wishes—­”

“Go!” reiterated the Little One with a stamp of her boot.  “You know the great tent where she is throned in honor—­Morbleu!—­as if the oldest and ugliest hag that washes out my soldiers’ linen were not of more use and more deserved such lodgment than Mme. la Princesse, who has never done aught in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold!  She waits for you.  Where are your palace manners?  Go to her, I tell you.  She is of your own people; we are not!”

The vehement, imperious phrases coursed in disorder one after another, rapid and harsh, and vibrating with a hundred repressed emotions.  He paused one moment, doubting whether she did not play some trick upon him; then, without a word, left her, and went rapidly through the evening shadows.

Cigarette stood looking after him with a gaze that was very evil, almost savage, in its wrath, in its pain, in its fiery jealousy, that ached so hotly in her, and was chained down by that pride which was as intense in the Vivandiere of Algeria as ever it could be in any Duchess of a Court.  Reckless, unfeminine, hardened, vitiated in much, as all her sex would have deemed, and capable of the utmost abandonment to her passion had it been returned, the haughty young soul of the child of the People was as sensitively delicate in this one thing as the purest and chastest among women could have been; she dreaded above every other thing that he should ever suspect that she loved him, or that she desired his love.

Her honor, her generosity, her pity for him, her natural instinct to do the thing that was right, even to her foes, any one of the unstudied and unanalyzed qualities in her had made her serve him even at her rival’s bidding.  But it had cost her none the less hardly because so manfully done; none the less did all the violent, ruthless hate, the vivid, childlike fury, the burning, intolerable jealousy of her nature combat in her with the cruel sense of her own unlikeness with that beauty which had subdued even herself, and with that nobler impulse of self-sacrifice which grew side by side with the baser impulses of passion.