them say as they would, that I should not live the night
through. But, lest existence should linger to curse me, to chain you, I
rent the linen bands off my wounds an hour ago. All their science will
not put back the life now! My limbs are dead, and the cold steals up!
Ah, love! Ah, love! You never thought how men can suffer! But have no
grief for me. I am happy. Bend your head down, and lay your lips on mine
once. You are my own!--death is sweeter than life!"

And before sunrise he died.

Some shadow from that fatal and tragic midnight marriage rested on her
still. Though she was blameless, some vague remorse ever haunted her;
though she had been so wholly guiltless of it, this death for her sake
ever seemed in some sort of her bringing. Men thought her only colder,
only prouder; but they erred. She was one of those women who, beneath
the courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of infinite
tenderness, infinite nobility, and infinite self-reproach.

A great French painter once, in Rome, looking on her from a distance,
shaded his eyes with his hand, as if her beauty, like the sun dazzled
him. "Exquisite--superb!" he muttered; and he was a man whose own ideals
were so matchless that living women rarely could wring out his praise.
"She is nearly perfect, your Princesse Corona!"

"Nearly!" cried a Roman sculptor. "What, in Heaven's name, can she
want?"

"Only one thing!"

"And that is----"

"To have loved."

Wherewith he turned into the Greco.

He had found the one flaw--and it was still there. What he missed in her
was still wanting.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE.

"V'la ce que c'est la gloire--au grabat!"

The contemptuous sentence was crushed through Cigarette's tight-pressed,
bright-red lips, with an irony sadder than tears. She was sitting on
the edge of a grabat, hard as wood, comfortless as a truss of straw, and
looking down the long hospital room, with its endless rows of beds and
its hot sun shining blindingly on its glaring, whitewashed walls.

She was well known and well loved there. When her little brilliant-hued
figure fluttered, like some scarlet bird of Africa, down the dreary
length of those chambers of misery, bloodless lips, close-clinched in
torture, would stir with a smile, would move with a word of welcome.
No tender-voiced, dove-eyed Sister of Orders of Mercy, gliding gray and
soft, and like a living psalm of consolation, beside those couches of
misery,