He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing figures in the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scabbard; yet he had all the look about him of a brilliant French soldier, of one who, moreover, had seen hot and stern service. He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so after the red, brown, and black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for his skin was naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very soft--for which M. Tata had growled contemptuously, “a woman's face”--a long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, as he leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs' uniform, with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his knee, was, as Cigarette's critical eye told her, the figure of a superb cavalry rider; light, supple, long of limb, wide of chest, with every sinew and nerve firm-knit as links of steel. She glanced at his hands, which were very white, despite the sun of Algiers and the labors that fall to a private of Chasseurs. “Beau lion!” she thought, “and noble, whatever he is.” But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of the Algerian regiments; she had known so many of them--those gilded butterflies of the Chaussee d'Antin, those lordly spendthrifts of the vieille roche, who had served in the battalions of the demi-cavalry, or the squadrons of the French Horse, to be thrust, nameless and unhonored, into a sand-hole hastily dug with bayonets in the hot hush of an African night. She woke him unceremoniously from his reverie, with a challenge to wine. “Ah, ha! Tata Leroux says you are English; by the faith, he must be right, or you would never sit musing there like an owl in the sunlight! Take a draught of my burgundy; bright as rubies. I never sell bad wines--not I! I know better than to drink them myself.” He started and rose; and, before he took the little wooden drinking-cup, bowed to her, raising his cap with a grave, courteous obeisance; a bow that had used to be noted in throne-rooms for its perfection of grace. “Ah, ma belle, is it you?” he said wearily. “You do me much honor.” Cigarette gave a little petulant twist to the tap of her wine-barrel. She was not used to that style of salutation. She half liked it--half resented it. It made her wish, with an impatient scorn for the wish, that she knew how to read and had not her hair cut short like a boy's--a weakness the little vivandiere had never been visited with before. “Morbleu!” she said pettishly. “You are too fine for us mon brave. In what country, I should wonder, does one learn such dainty ceremony as that?”