Cigarette had too often played a game at spying and reconnoitering for her regiments, and played it with a cleverness that distanced even the most ruse of the Zephyrs, not to be able to do just whatever she chose, in taking the way she liked, and lurking unseen at discretion.
She crossed the breadth of the grounds under the heavy shade of arbutus trees with a hare's fleetness, and stood a second looking at the open windows and the terraces that lay before them, brightly lighted by the summer moon and by the lamps that sparkled among the shrubs.

Then down she dropped, as quickly, as lightly, as a young setter, down among the ferns, into a shower of rhododendrons, whose rose and lilac blossoms shut her wholly within them, like a fairy inclosed in bloom.

The good fairy of one life there she was assuredly, though she might be but a devil-may-care, audacious, careless little feminine Belphegor and military Asmodeus.
"Ah!" she said quickly and sharply, with a deep-drawn breath.

The single exclamation was at once a menace, a tenderness, a whirlwind of rage, a volume of disdain, a world of pity.

It was intensely French, and the whole nature of Cigarette was in it.
Yet all she saw was a small and brilliant group sauntering to and fro before the open windows, after dinner, listening to the bands, which, through dinner, had played to them, and laughing low and softly; and, at some distance from them, beneath the shade of a cedar, the figure of a Corporal of Chasseurs,--calm, erect, motionless,--as though he were the figure of a soldier cast in bronze.