heard; and looked up at him with a look in which all the passionate,
hopeless, imperishable love she had resisted and concealed so long
spoke with an intensity she never dreamed.

"She is content," she whispered softly. "You did not understand her
rightly; that was all."

"_All!_ O God! how I have wronged you!"

The full strength, and nobility, and devotion of this passion he had
disbelieved in and neglected rushed on him as he met her eyes; for the
first time he saw her as she was, for the first time he saw all of which
the splendid heroism of this untrained nature would have been capable
under a different fate. And it struck him suddenly, heavily, as with a
blow; it filled him with a passion of remorse.

"My darling!--my darling! what have I done to be worthy of such love?"
he murmured, while the tears fell from his blinded eyes, and his head
drooped until his lips met hers. At the first utterance of that word
between them, at the unconscious tenderness of his kisses that had the
anguish of a farewell in them, the colour suddenly flushed all over her
blanched face; she trembled in his arms; and a great shivering sigh ran
through her. It came too late, this warmth of love. She learned what its
sweetness might have been only when her lips grew numb, and her eyes
sightless, and her heart without pulse, and her senses without
consciousness.

"Hush!" she answered, with a look that pierced his soul. "Keep those
kisses for Miladi. She will have the right to love you; she is of your
'_aristocrates_,' she is not 'unsexed.' As for me,--I am only a little
trooper who has saved my comrade! My soldiers, come round me one
instant; I shall not long find words."

Her eyes closed as she spoke; a deadly faintness and coldness passed
over her; and she gasped for breath. A moment, and the resolute courage
in her conquered: her eyes opened and rested on the war-worn faces of
her "children"--rested in a long-lost look of unspeakable wistfulness
and tenderness.

"I cannot speak as I would," she said at length, while her voice grew
very faint. "But I have loved you. All is said!"

All was uttered in those four brief words. "She had loved them." The
whole story of her young life was told in the single phrase. And the
gaunt, battle-scarred, murderous, ruthless veterans of Africa who heard
her could have turned their weapons against their own breasts, and
sheathed them there, rather than have looked on to see their darling
die.

"I