Yet this death was very bitter to him.

He wondered with a dull sense of aching impatience why no Bedouin bullet, no Arab saber, had ever found his own life out, and cut his thralls asunder.
The evening had just followed on the glow of the day--evening, more lustrous even than ever, for the houses were all aglitter with endless lines of colored lamps and strings of sparkling illuminations, a very sea of bright-hued fire.

The noise, the mirth, the sudden swell of music, the pleasure-seeking crowds--all that were about him--served only to make more desolate and more oppressive by their contrast his memories of that life, once gracious, and gifted, and content with the dower of its youth, ruined by a woman, and now slaughtered here, for no avail and with no honor, by a lance-thrust in a midnight skirmish, which had been unrecorded even in the few lines of the gazette that chronicled the war news of Algeria.
Passing one of the cafes, a favorite resort of the officers of his own regiment, he saw Cigarette.

A sheaf of blue, and white, and scarlet lights flashed with tongues of golden flame over her head, and a great tricolor flag, with the brass eagle above it, was hanging in the still, hot air from the balcony from which she leaned.

Her tunic-skirt was full of bonbons and crackers that she was flinging down among the crowd while she sang; stopping every now and then to exchange some passage of gaulois wit with them that made her hearers scream with laughter, while behind her was a throng of young officers drinking champagne, eating ices, and smoking; echoing her songs and her satires with enthusiastic voices and stamps of their spurred bootheels.