But Cigarette remained wakeful.
She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, Etoile Filante,
with her head on the beast's glossy flank and her hand among his mane.
She often slept thus in camp, and the horse would lie still and cramped
for hours rather than awaken her, or, if he rose, would take the most
watchful heed to leave unharmed the slender limbs, the flushed cheeks,
the frank, fair brow of the sleeper beneath him, that one stroke of his
hoof could have stamped out into a bruised and shapeless mass.
To-night Etoile Filante slept, and his mistress was awake--wide-awake,
with her eyes looking out into the darkness beyond, with a passionate
mist of unshed tears in them, and her mouth quivering with pain and with
wrath. The vehement excitation had not died away in her, but there had
come with it a dull, spiritless, aching depression. It had roused her to
fury to hear the reference to her rival spoken--of that aristocrat whose
name had been on Cecil's lips when he had been delirious. She had kept
his secret loyally, she had defended him vehemently; there was something
that touched her to the core in the thought of the love with which he
had recognized this friend who, in ignorance, spoke of him as of some
unknown French soldier. She could not tell what the history was, but
she could divine nearly enough to feel its pathos and its pain. She had
known, in her short life, more of men and of their passions and of their
fortunes than many lives of half a century in length can ever do; she
could guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, the past which
had exiled the man who had kept by him his lost mother's ring as the
sole relic of years to which he was dead so utterly as though he were
lying in his coffin.
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