With which sally Cigarette thrust her pretty soft curls back of her temples, and launched herself into lansquenet with all the ardor of a gambler and the vivacity of a child; her eyes flashing, her cheeks flushing, her little teeth set, her whole soul in a whirl of the game, made all the more riotous by the peals of laughter from her comrades and the wines that were washed down like water. Cigarette was a terrible little gamester, and had gaming made very easy to her, for it was the creed of the Army that her losses never counted, but her gains were paid to her often double or treble. Indeed, so well did she play, and so well did the goddess of hazard favor her, that she might have grown a millionaire on the fruits of her dice and her cards, but for this fact, that whatever the little Friend of the Flag had in her hands one hour was given away the next, to the first wounded soldier, or ailing veteran, or needy Arab woman that required the charity. As much gold was showered on her as on Isabel of the Jockey Club; but Cigarette was never the richer for it. “Bah!” she would say, when they told her of her heedlessness, “money is like a mill, no good standing still. Let it turn, turn, turn, as fast as ever it can, and the more bread will come from it for the people to eat.” The vivandiere was by instinct a fine political economist. Meanwhile, where she had left him among the stones of the ruined mosque, the Chasseur, whom they nicknamed Bel-a-faire-peur, in a double sense, because of his “woman's face,” as Tata Leroux termed it, and because of the terror his sword had become through North Africa, sat motionless with his right arm resting on his knee, and his spurred heel thrust into the sand; the sun shining down unheeded in its fierce, burning glare on the chestnut masses of his beard and the bright glitter of his uniform. He was a dashing cavalry soldier, who had had a dozen wounds cut over his body by the Bedouin swords, in many and hot skirmishes; who had waited through sultry African nights for the lion's tread, and had fought the desert-king and conquered; who had ridden a thousand miles over the great sand waste, and the boundless arid plains, and slept under the stars with the saddle beneath his head, and his rifle in his hand, all through the night; who had served, and served well, in fierce, arduous, unremitting work, in trying campaigns and in close discipline; who had blent the verve, the brilliance, the daring, the eat-drink-and-enjoy-for-to-morrow-we-die of the French Chasseur, with something that was very different, and much more tranquil. Yet, though as bold a man as any enrolled in the French Service, he sat alone here in the shadow of the column, thoughtful, motionless, lost in silence. In his left hand was a Galignani, six months old, and his eye rested on a line in the obituary: “On the 10th ult., at Royallieu, suddenly, the Right Hon. Denzil, Viscount Royallieu; aged 90.” CHAPTER XVI. CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE.