absent had ever troubled her present;
it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting,
unconquerable fear for another had approached her: fear--she had never
known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him--a man whose
lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might
have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!

She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable passionate
shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the
insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they
were shot to-day; and now he--he whose careless, calm caress would make
her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never
known--he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had
roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a
deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.

Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and loyal fealty
that is inborn with such natures as hers. To have betrayed what he had
trusted to her, because she was neglected and wounded by him, would have
been a feminine baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette
would have been totally incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, and
rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be
stealing and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman.

Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the secret with
which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only studied with interest
and keenness the face and the words of this man whom he had loved, and
from whom he had fled as criminals flee from their accusers.

"What is your name?" she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the
amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the
officers of Chasseurs were entertaining him.

"Well--some call me Seraph."

"Ah! you have petite names, then, in Albion? I should have though she
was too somber and too stiff for them. Besides?"

"Lyonnesse."

"What a droll name! What are you?"

"A soldier."

"Good! What grade?"

"A Colonel of Guards."

Cigarette gave a little whistle to herself; she remembered that a
Marshal of France had once said of a certain Chasseur, "He has the seat
of the English Guards."

"My pretty catechist, M. le Duc does not tell you his title," cried one
of the officers.

Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head.

"Ouf! Tit