Cigarette stretched out her hand to him--that tiny brown hand, which, small though it was, had looked so burned and so hard beside the delicate fairy ivory carvings of his workmanship--stretched it out with a frank, winning, childlike, soldierlike grace.
"That's right, you are a true soldier!" He bent over the hand she held to his in the courtesy natural with him to all her sex, and touched it lightly with his lips.
"Thank you, my little comrade," he said simply, with the graver thought still on him that her relation and her entreaty had evoked; "you have given me a lesson that I shall not be quick to forget." Cigarette was the wildest little baccanal that ever pirouetted for the delight of half a score of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves and half-drunk; she was the most reckless coquette that ever made the roll-call of her lovers range from prince-marshals to plowboy conscripts; she had flirted as far and wide as the butterfly flirts with the blossoms it flutters on to through the range of a summer day; she took kisses, if the giver of them were handsome, as readily as a child takes sweetmeats at Mardi Gras; and of feminine honor, feminine scruples, feminine delicacy, knew nothing save by such very dim, fragmentary instincts as nature still planted in scant growth amid the rank soil and the pestilent atmosphere of camp-life.

Her eyes had never sunk, her face had never flushed, her heart had never panted for the boldest or the wildest wooer of them all, from M.de Duc's Lauzunesque blandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire's or Miou-Miou's rough overtures; she had the coquetry of her nation with the audacity of a boy.

Now only, for the first time, Cigarette colored hotly at the grave, graceful, distant salute, so cold and so courteous, which was offered her in lieu of the rude and boisterous familiarities to which she was accustomed; and drew her hand away with what was, to the shame of her soldierly hardihood and her barrack tutelage, very nearly akin to an impulse of shyness.
"Dame! Don't humbug me! I am not a court lady!" she cried hastily, almost petulantly, to cover the unwonted and unwelcome weakness; while, to make good the declaration and revindicate her military renown, she balanced herself lightly on the stone ledge of her oval hole, and sprang, with a young wildcat's easy, vaulting leap, over his head, and over the heads of the people beneath, on to the ledge of the house opposite, a low-built wine-shop, whose upper story nearly touched the leaning walls of the old Moorish buildings in which she had been perched.

The crowd in the street below looked up, amazed and aghast, at that bound from casement to casement as she flew over their heads like a blue-and-scarlet winged bird of Oran; but they laughed as they saw who it was.
"It is Cigarette! Ah, ha! the devil, for a certainty, must have been her father!" "To be sure!" cried the Friend of the Flag, looking from her elevation; "he is a very good father, too, and I don't tease him like his sons the priests! But I have told him to take you the next time you are stripping a dead body; so look on it--he won't have to wait long." The discomfited Indigene hustled his way, with many an oath, through the laughing crowd as best he might; and Cigarette, with an airy pirouette on the wine-shop's roof that would have done honor to any opera boards, and was executed as carelessly, twenty feet above earth, as if she had been a pantomime-dancer all her days, let herself down by the awning, hand over hand, like a little mouse from the harbor, jumped on to a forage wagon that was just passing full trot down the street, and disappeared; standing on the piles of hay, and singing.
Cecil looked after her, with a certain touch of pity for her in him.
"What a gallant boy is spoiled in that little Amazon!" he thought; the quick flush of her face, the quick withdrawal of her hand, he had not noticed; she had not much interest for him,--scarcely any indeed,--save that he saw she was pretty, with a mignonne, mischievous face, that all the sun-tan of Africa and all the wild life of the Caserne would not harden or debase.

But he was sorry a child so bright and so brave should be turned into three parts a trooper as she was, should have been tossed up on the scum and filth of the lowest barrack life, and should be doomed in a few years' time to become the yellow, battered, foul-mouthed, vulture-eyed camp-follower that premature old age would surely render the darling of the tricolor, the pythoness of the As de Pique.
Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of Sex, dancing it down, drinking it down, laughing it down, burning it out in tobacco fumes, drowning it in trembling cascades of wine, trampling it to dust under the cancan by her little brass-bound boots, mocking it away with her slang jests, and her Theresa songs, and her devil-may-care audacities, till there was scarce a trace of it left in this prettiest and wildest little scamp of all the Army in Africa.