ssion unutterably
sad, deliriously strong.

That passion moved her strangely.

As she looked down upon them, she knew that not one man breathed among
that tumultuous mass but would have died that moment at her word; not
one mouth moved among that countless host but breathed her name in
pride, and love, and honor.

She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little brigand, a
child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; but she was more
than these. The divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette
would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne
d'Arc. The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable
patriotism, the melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and
unnumbered sufferings of the people were in her, instinctive and inborn,
as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved
her now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the
crowding soldiery.

"It was nothing," she answered them--"it was nothing. It was for
France."

For France! They shouted back the beloved word with tenfold joy; and the
great sea of life beneath her tossed to and fro in stormy triumph, in
frantic paradise of victory, ringing her name with that of France upon
the air, in thunder-shouts like spears of steel smiting on shields of
bronze.

But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to the
desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe for them.

"Hush!" she said softly, with an accent in her voice that hushed the
riot of their rejoicing homage till it lulled like the lull in a storm.
"Give me no honor while they sleep yonder. With the dead lies the
glory!"

CHAPTER XXIX.

BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE.

"Hold!" cried Cigarette, interrupting herself in her chant in honor of
the attributes of war, as the Tringlo's mules which she was driving,
some three weeks after the fray of Zaraila, stopped, by sheer force of
old habit, in the middle of a green plateau on the outskirts of a camp
pitched in its center, and overlooked by brown, rugged scarps of rock,
with stunted bushes on their summits, and here and there a maritime
pine clinging to their naked slopes. At sight of the food-laden little
beasts, and the well-known form behind them, the Tirailleurs, Indigenes,
and the Zouaves, on whose side of the encampment she had approached,
rushed toward her with frantic shouts, and wild delight, and vehement
hurrahs in a tempest of vocifero