uffocating fear, which, turn by turn, quickened and
slackened the bright flow of her warm, young blood as she searched among
the slain.

"Ah! le pauvre Picpon!" she said softly, as she reached at last the
place where the young Chasseur lay, and lifted the black curls off
his forehead. The hoofs of the charging cavalry had cruelly struck and
trampled his frame; the back had been broken, and the body had been
mashed as in a mortar under the thundering gallop of the Horse; but the
face was still uninjured, and had a strange, pathetic beauty, a calm and
smiling courage on it. It was ashen pale; but the great black eyes that
had glistened in such malicious mirth, and sparkled in such malignant
mischief during life, were open, and had a mournful, pitiful serenity in
their look as if from their depths the soul still gazed--that soul which
had been neglected and cursed, and left to wander among evil ways,
yet which, through all its darkness, all its ignorance, had reached,
unguided, to love and to nobility.

Cigarette closed their long, black lashes down on the white cheeks with
soft and reverent touch; she had seen that look ere now on the upturned
faces of the dead who had strewn the barricades of Paris, with the words
of the Marseillaise the last upon their lips.

To her there could be no fate fairer, no glory more glorious, than this
of his--to die for France. And she laid him gently down, and left him,
and went on with her quest.

It was here that she had lost sight of Cecil as they had charged
together, and her mare, enraged and intoxicated with noise and terror,
had torn away at full speed that had outstripped even the swiftest of
her Spahis. A little farther on a dog's moan caught her ear; she turned
and looked across. Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers,
sat the small, snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air with its
little paws, as it had been taught to do when it needed anything, and
howling piteously as it begged.

"Flick-Flack? What is it, Flick-Flack?" she cried to him, while, with a
bound, she reached the spot. The dog leaped on her, rejoicing. The dead
were thick there--ten or twelve deep--French trooper and Bedouin rider
flung across each other, horribly entangled with the limbs, the manes,
the shattered bodies of their own horses. Among them she saw the face
she sought, as the dog eagerly ran back, caressing the hair of a soldier
who lay underneath the weight of his gray charger, that