rd. His comrade had seen the
hemorrhage many times; yet now he knew, as he had never known before,
that that was death.

As he held him upward in his arms, and shouted loud for help, the great
luminous eyes of the French soldier looked up at him through their mist
with the deep, fond gratitude that beams in the eyes of a dog as it
drops down to die, knowing one touch and one voice to the last.

"You do not forsake," he murmured brokenly, while his voice ebbed
faintly away as the stream of his life flowed faster and faster out.
"It is over now--so best! If only I could have seen France once more.
France----"

He stretched his arms outward as he spoke, with the vain longing of
a hopeless love. Then a deep sigh quivered through his lips; his hand
strove to close on the hand of his comrade, and his head fell, resting
on the flushed blossoms of the rose-buds of Provence.

He was dead.

An hour later Cecil left the hospital, seeing and hearing nothing of the
gay riot of the town about him, though the folds of many-colored silk
and bunting fluttered across the narrow Moorish streets, and the whole
of the populace was swarming through them with the vivacious enjoyment
of Paris mingling with the stately, picturesque life of Arab habit and
custom. He was well used to pain of every sort; his bread had long been
the bread of bitterness, and the waters of his draught been of gall. Yet
this stroke, though looked for, fell heavily and cut far.

Yonder, in the deadroom, there lay a broken, useless mass of flesh and
bone that in the sight of the Bureau Arabe was only a worn-out machine
that had paid its due toll to the wars of the Second Empire, and was now
valueless; only fit to be cast in to rot, unmourned, in the devouring
African soil. But to him that lifeless, useless mass was dear still; was
the wreck of the bravest, tenderest, and best-loved friend that he had
found in his adversity.

In Leon Ramon he had found a man whom he had loved, and who had loved
him. They had suffered much, and much endured together; their very
dissimilarities had seemed to draw them nearer to each other. The
gentle impassiveness of the Englishman had been like rest to the ardent
impetuosity of the French soldier; the passionate and poetic temperament
of the artist-trooper had revealed to Cecil a thousand views of thought
and of feeling which had never before then dawned on him. And now that
the one lay dead, a heavy, weary sense of loneliness