"White hands, morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in other people's pockets as yours are!" This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; the screams of mirth redoubled.

Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whom the wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he was getting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to the infinite glee of the whole ballroom.
"Dame!--his hands cannot work as mine can!" growled her opponent.
"Oh, ho!" cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; "they don't twist cocks' throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours; but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appetite, if they could touch such canaille." "Canaille ?" thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise.

"If you were but a man!" "What would you do to me, brigand ?" screamed Cigarette, in fits of laughter.

"Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave you last week for stealing his gun from a new soldier ?" A growl like a lion's from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; she had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappy young conscript's rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him, and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.
"Sacre bleu!" he roared; "you are in love with this conqueror of women--this soldier aristocrat!" The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder tumult of laughter; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from Barbe-Grise.
Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire at him, blinded his eyes, and drenched his beard with the red torrent and the shower of glass slivers, and was back again dancing like a little Bacchante, and singing at the top of her sweet, lark-like voice.
At the sound of the animated altercation, not knowing but what one of his own troopers might be the delinquent, he who leaned out of the little casement moved forward to the doorway of the dancing room; he did not guess that it was himself whom she had defended against the onslaught of the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise.
His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above most even of the lofty-statured Spahis, and her rapid glance flashed over him at once.

"Did he hear ?" she wondered; the scarlet flush of exercise and excitement deepened on her clear brown cheek, that had never blushed at the coarsest jests or the broadest love words of the barrack-life that had been about her ever since her eyes first opened in her infancy to laugh at the sun-gleam on a cuirassier's corslet among the baggage-wagons that her mother followed.