Cigarette heard; she never made a movement or gave a sound, but all the blood fled out of her brilliant face, leaving it horribly blanched beneath its brown sun-scorch; and her eyes—­distended, senseless, sightless—­were fastened on the old man’s slowly moving mouth.

“Read it again!” she said simply, when all was ended.  He started and looked up at her face; the voice had not one accent of its own tone left.

He obeyed, and read it once more to the end.  Then a loud, shuddering sigh escaped her, like the breath of one stifling under flames.

“Shot!” she said vacantly.  “Shot!”

Her vengeance had come without her once lifting her hand to summon it.

The old man rose hurriedly.

“Child!  Art thou ill?”

“The blow was struck for her!” she muttered.  “It was that night, you hear—­that night!”

“What night?  Thou lookest so strangely!  Dost thou love this doomed soldier?”

Cigarette laughed—­a laugh whose echo thrilled horribly through the lonely Moresco courtway.

“Love?  Love?  I hated him, look you!  So I said.  And I longed for my vengeance.  It is come!”

She was still a moment; her white, parched mouth quivering as though she were under physical torture, her strained eyes fastened on the empty air, the veins in her throat swelling and throbbing till they glowed to purple.  Then she crushed the letter in one hand, and flew, fleet as any antelope through the streets of the Moorish quarter, and across the city to the quay.

The people ever gave way before her; but now they scattered like frightened sheep from her path.  There was something that terrified them in that bloodless horror set upon her face, and in that fury of resistless speed with which she rushed upon her way.

Once only in her headlong career through the throngs she paused; it was as one face, on which the strong light of the noontide poured, came before her.  The senseless look changed in her eyes; she wheeled out of her route, and stopped before the man who had thus arrested her.  He was leaning idly over the stall of a Turkish bazaar, and her hand grasped his arm before he saw her.

“You have his face!” she muttered.  “What are you to him?”

He made no answer; he was too amazed.

“You are of his race,” she persisted.  “You are brethren by your look.  What are you to him?”

“To whom?”

“To the man who calls himself Louis Victor!  A Chasseur of my army!”

Her eyes were fastened entirely on him; keen, ruthless, fierce, in this moment as a hawk’s.  He grew pale and murmured an incoherent denial.  He sought to shake her off, first gently, then more rudely; he called her mad, and tried to fling her from him; but the lithe fingers only wound themselves closer on his arm.

“Be still—­fool!” she muttered; and there was that in the accent that lent a strange force and dignity in that moment to the careless and mischievous plaything of the soldiery—­force that overcame him, dignity that overawed him.  “You are of his people; you have his eyes, and his look, and his features.  He disowns you, or you him.  No matter which.  He is of your blood; and he lies under sentence of death.  Do you know that?”