“None,” said Cecil, with the same inflection of annoyance in his voice; to have his passing encounter with this beautiful patrician pass into a barrack canard, through the unsparing jests of the soldiery around him, was a prospect very unwelcome to him. “None whatever. A generous thoughtfulness for our common necessities as soldiers--” “Ouf!” interrupted Cigarette, before his phrase was one-third finished. “The stalled mare will not go with the wild coursers; an aristocrat may live with us, but he will always cling to his old order. This is the story that runs with the roses. Milady was languidly insolent over some ivory chessmen, and Corporal Victor thought it divine, because languor and insolence are the twin gods of the noblesse, parbleu! Milady, knowing no gods but those two, worships them, and sends to the soldiers of France, as the sort of sacrifice her gods love, fruits, and wines that, day after day, are set on her table, to be touched, if tasted at all, with a butterfly's sip; and Corporal Victor finds this a charity sublime--to give what costs nothing, and scatter a few crumbs out from the profusion of a life of waste and indulgence! And I say that, if my children are of my fashion of thinking, they will choke like dogs dying of thirst rather than slake their throats with alms cast to them as if they were beggars!” With which fiery and bitter enunciation of her views on the gifts of the Princesse Corona d'Amague, Cigarette struck light to her brule-guele, and thrusting it between her lips, with her hands in the folds of her scarlet waist-sash, went off with the light, swift step natural to her, exaggerated into the carriage she had learned of the Zouaves; laughing her good-morrows noisily to this and that trooper as she passed their couches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the place where the dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudent drinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever celebrated wine, women, and war in the lawlessness of the lingua Sabir. Her wrath was hot, and her heart heavy within her. She had given up her whole fete-day to wait on the anguish and to soothe the solitude of his friend lying dying there; and her reward had been to hear him speak of this aristocrat's donations, that cost her nothing but the trouble of a few words of command to her household, as though they were the saintly charities of some angel from heaven! “Diantre!” she muttered, as her hand wandered to the ever-beloved forms of the pistols within her sash. “Any of them would throw a draught of wine in his face, and lay him dead for me with a pass or two ten minutes after. Why don't I bid them? I have a mind----”