His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above most even of
the lofty-statured Spahis, and her rapid glance flashed over him at
once. "Did he hear?" she wondered; the scarlet flush of exercise and
excitement deepened on her clear brown cheek, that had never blushed at
the coarsest jests or the broadest love words of the barrack-life that
had been about her ever since her eyes first opened in her infancy
to laugh at the sun-gleam on a cuirassier's corslet among the
baggage-wagons that her mother followed. She thought he had not heard;
his face was grave, a little weary, and his gaze, as it fell on her, was
abstracted.
"Oh!" thought Cigarette, with a flash of hot wrath superseding her
momentary and most rare embarrassment. "You are looking at me and not
thinking of me! We will soon change that!"
Such an insult she had never been subjected to, from the first day when
she had danced for sweetmeats on the top of a great drum when she was
three years old, in the middle of a circular camp of Tirailleurs. It
sent fresh nerve into her little limbs. It made her eyes flash like
so much fire, it gave her a millionfold more grace, more abandon, more
heedlessness. She stamped her tiny, spurred foot petulantly.
"Quicker! Quicker!" she cried; and as the musician obeyed her, she
whirled, she spun, she bounded, she seemed to live in air, while her
soft curls blew off her brow, and her white teeth glanced, and her
cheeks glowed with a carmine glow, and the little gold aiglettes broke
across her chest with the beating of her heart that throbbed like a
bird's heart when it is wild with the first breath of Spring.
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