He had given her little attention; a waltz, a cigar, a passing jest, were all he had bestowed on the little lionne of the Spahis corps; and the deepest sentiment she had ever awakened in him was an involuntary pity--pity for this flower which blossomed on the polluted field of war, and under the poison-dropping branches of lawless crime.

A flower, bright-hued and sun-fed, glancing with the dews of youth now, when it had just unclosed, in all its earliest beauty, but already soiled and tainted by the bed from which it sprang, and doomed to be swept away with time, scentless and loveless, down the rapid, noxious current of that broad, black stream of vice on which it now floated so heedlessly.
Even now his thoughts drifted from her almost before the sound of the horse's hoofs had died where he sat on a loose pile of stones, with the lifeless limbs of the Arab at his feet.
"Who was it in my old life that she is like ?" he was musing.

It was the deep-blue, dreaming haughty eyes of the Princesse that he was bringing back to memory, not the brown, mignon face that had been so late close to his in the light of the moon.
Meanwhile, on his good gray, Cigarette rode like a true Chasseur herself.

She was used to the saddle, and would ride a wild desert colt without stirrup or bridle; balancing her supple form now on one foot, now on the other, on the animal's naked back, while they flew at full speed.

Not so fantastically, but full as speedily, she dashed down into the city, scattering all she met with right and left, till she rode straight up to the barracks of the Chasseurs d'Afrique.