ll the Children of France may have seen,
in battle or in insurrection, grow beautiful upon the young face of a
conscript or a boy-insurgent as he lifted a dying comrade, or pushed to
the front to be slain in another's stead; the face that a moment before
had been keen for the slaughter as the eyes of a kite, and recklessly
gay as the saucy refrain the lips caroled.

A step sounded on the bare boards; she looked up; and the wounded man
raised his weary lids with a gleam of gladness under them; Cecil bent
above his couch.

"Dear Leon! How is it with you?"

His voice was softened to infinite tenderness; Leon Ramon had been for
many a year his comrade and his friend; an artist of Paris, a man of
marvelous genius, of high idealic creeds, who, in a fatal moment of rash
despair, had flung his talents, his broken fortunes, his pure and noble
spirit, into the fiery furnace of the hell of military Africa; and now
lay dying here, a common soldier, forgotten as though he were already in
his grave.

"The review is just over. I got ten minutes to spare, and came to you
the instant I could," pursued Cecil. "See here what I bring you! You,
with your artist's soul, will feel yourself all but well when you look
on these!"

He spoke with a hopefulness he could never feel, for he knew that the
life of Leon Ramon was doomed; and as the other strove to gain breath
enough to answer him, he gently motioned him to silence, and placed
on his bed some peaches bedded deep in moss and circled round with
stephanotis, with magnolia, with roses, with other rarer flowers still.

The face of the artist-soldier lightened with a longing joy; his lips
quivered.

"Ah, God! they have the fragrance of my France!"

Cecil said nothing, but moved them nearer in to the clasp of hie eager
hands. Cigarette he did not see.

There were some moments of silence, while the dark eyes of the dying man
thirstily dwelt on the beauty of the flowers, and his dry, ashen lips
seemed to drink in their perfumes as those athirst drink in water.

"They are beautiful," he said faintly, at length. "They have our youth
in them. How came you by them, dear friend?"

"They are not due to me," answered Cecil hurriedly. "Mme. la
Princess Corona sends them to you. She has sent great gifts to the
hospital--wines, fruits, a profusion of flowers, such as those. Through
her, these miserable chambers will bloom for a while like a garden;
and the best wines of Europe will slake your