She was thinking of the
starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great,
dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and
one who might never return.
It was the first time that the 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.
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