The words were unwavering and heroic; but for one moment a convulsion went over her face; the young life was so strong in her, the young spirit was so joyous in her, existence was so new, so fresh, so bright, so dauntless a thing to Cigarette.  She loved life; the darkness, the loneliness, the annihilation of death were horrible to her as the blackness and the solitude of night to a young child.  Death, like night, can be welcome only to the weary, and she was weary of nothing on the earth that bore her buoyant steps; the suns, the winds, the delights of the sights, the joys of the senses, the music of her own laughter, the mere pleasure of the air upon her cheeks, or of the blue sky above her head, were all so sweet to her.  Her welcome of her death-shot was the only untruth that had ever soiled her fearless lips.  Death was terrible; yet she was content—­content to have come to it for his sake.

There was a ghastly, stricken silence round her.  The order she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, than the martyrdom of her death.

The color was fast passing from her lips, and a mortal pallor settling there in the stead of that rich, bright hue, once warm as the scarlet heart of the pomegranate.  Her head leaned back on Cecil’s breast and she felt the great burning tears fall, one by one, upon her brow as he hung speechless over her; she put her hand upward and touched his eyes softly.

“Chut!  What is it to die—­just to die?  You have lived your martyrdom; I could not have done that.  Listen, just one moment.  You will be rich.  Take care of the old man—­he will not trouble long—­and of Vole-qui-veut and Etoile, and Boule Blanche, and the rat, and all the dogs, will you?  They will show you the Chateau de Cigarette in Algiers.  I should not like to think that they would starve.”

She felt his lips move with the promise he could not find voice to utter; and she thanked him with that old child-like smile that had lost nothing of its light.

“That is good; they will be happy with you.  And see here—­that Arab must have back his white horse; he alone saved you.  Have heed that they spare him.  And make my grave somewhere where my army passes; where I can hear the trumpets, and the arms, and the passage of the troops—­O God!  I forgot!  I shall not wake when the bugles sound.  It will all end now; will it not?  That is horrible, horrible!”

A shudder shook her as, for the moment, the full sense that all her glowing, redundant, sunlit, passionate life was crushed out forever from its place upon the earth forced itself on and overwhelmed her.  But she was of too brave a mold to suffer any foe—­even the foe that conquers kings—­to have power to appall her.  She raised herself, and looked at the soldiery around her, among them the men whose carbines had killed her, whose anguish was like the heart-rending anguish of women.