As he glanced upward, she
looked literally in a blaze of luminance, and the wild, mellow tones of
her voice, ringing out sounded like a mockery of that dying-bed beside
which they had both so late stood together.
"She has the playfulness of the young leopard, and the cruelty," he
thought, with a sense of disgust; forgetting that she did not know what
he knew, and that, if Cigarette had waited to laugh until death had
passed by, she would have never laughed all her life through, in the
battalions of Africa.
She saw him, as he went beneath her balcony; and she sung all the
louder, she flung her sweetmeat missiles with reckless force; she
launched bolts of tenfold more audacious raillery at the delighted mob
below. Cigarette was "bon soldat"; when she was wounded, she wound her
scarf round the nerve that ached, and only laughed the gayer.
And he did her that injustice which the best among us are apt to do
to those whom we do not feel interest enough in to study with that
closeness which can alone give comprehension of the intricate and
complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so marvelously involved, of human
nature.
He thought her a little leopard, in her vivacious play and her inborn
bloodthirstiness.
Well, the little leopard of France played recklessly enough that
evening. Algiers was en fete, and Cigarette was sparkling over the
whole of the town like a humming-bird or a firefly--here and there, and
everywhere, in a thousand places at once, as it seemed; staying long
with none, making music and mirth with all.
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