knew, in some vague sense, that she was
dying, and dying thus for him.

She smiled up in his eyes, while even in that moment, when her life was
broken down like a wounded bird's, and the shots had pierced through
from her shoulder to her bosom, a hot scarlet flush came over her cheeks
as she felt his touch and rested on his heart.

"A life! _Tiens!_ what is it to give? We hold it in our hands every
hour, we soldiers, and toss it in change for a draught of wine. Lay me
down on the ground--at your feet--so! I shall live longest that way, and
I have much to tell. How they crowd around me! _Mes soldats_, do not
make that grief and that rage over me. They are sorry they fired; that
is foolish. They were only doing their duty, and they could not hear me
in time."

But the brave words could not console those who had killed the Child of
the Tricolour; they flung their carbines away, they beat their breasts,
they cursed themselves and the mother who had borne them; the silent,
rigid, motionless phalanx that had stood there in the dawn to see death
dealt in the inexorable penalty of the law was broken up into a
tumultuous, breathless, heart-stricken, infuriated throng, maddened with
remorse, convulsed with sorrow, turning wild eyes of hate on him as on
the cause through which their darling had been stricken. He, laying her
down with unspeakable gentleness as she had bidden him, hung over her,
leaning her head against his arm, and watching in paralysed horror the
helplessness of the quivering limbs, the slow flowing of the blood
beneath the Cross that shone where that young heroic heart so soon would
beat no more.

"Oh, my child, my child!" he moaned, as the full might and meaning of
this devotion which had saved him at such cost rushed on him. "What am I
worth that you should perish for me? Better a thousand times have left
me to my fate! Such nobility, such sacrifice, such love!"

The hot colour flushed her face once more; she was strong to the last to
conceal that passion for which she was still content to perish in her
youth.

"Chut! we are comrades, and you are a brave man. I would do the same for
any of my Spahis. Look you, I never heard of your arrest till I heard
too of your sentence"----

She paused a moment, and her features grew white, and quivered with pain
and with the oppression that seemed to lie like lead upon her chest. But
she forced herself to be stronger than the anguish which assailed her
strength; an