Take a glass of champagne?
How you look! Oh, the demoiselles, with the silver necks, are not barrack drink, of course; but I drink champagne always myself.

This is M.le Prince's.

He knows I only take the best brands." With which Cigarette, leaning down from her casement, whose sill was about a foot above his head, tendered her peace-offering in a bottle; three of which, packed in her knapsack, she had carried off from the luncheon-table of a Russian Prince who was touring through Algiers, and who had half lost his Grand Ducal head after the bewitching, dauntless, capricious, unattachable, unpurchasable, and coquettish little fire-eater of the Spahis, who treated him with infinitely more insolence and indifference than she would show to some battered old veteran, or some worn-out old dog, who had passed through the great Kabaila raids and battles.
"You will go to your Colonel's to-night ?" she said questioningly, as he drank the champagne, and thanked her--for he saw the spirit in which the gift was tendered--as he leaned against the half-ruined Moorish wall, with its blue-and-white striped awning spread over both their heads in the little street whose crowds, chatter, thousand eyes, and incessant traffic no way troubled Cigarette; who had talked argot to monarchs undaunted, and who had been one of the chief sights in a hundred grand reviews ever since she had been perched on a gun-carriage at five years old, and paraded with a troop of horse artillery in the Champ de Mars, as having gone through the whole of Bugeaud's campaign, at which parade, by the way, being tendered sweetmeats by a famous General's wife, Cigarette had made the immortal reply: "Madame, my sweetmeats are bullets!" She repeated her question imperiously, as Cecil kept silent.

"You will go to-night ?" He shrugged his shoulders.

He did not care to discuss his Colonel's orders with this pretty little Bacchante.
"Oh, a chief's command, you know--" "Ah, a fig for a chief!" retorted Cigarette impatiently.