The day stole on; Leon Ramon lay very quiet; the ice for his chest and the song for his ear gave him that semi-oblivion, dreamy and comparatively painless, which was the only mercy which could come to him.  All the chamber was unusually still; on three of the beds the sheet had been drawn over the face of the sleepers, who had sunk to a last sleep since the morning rose.  The shadows lengthened, the hours followed one another; Cigarette sang on to herself with few pauses; whenever she did so pause to lay soaked linen on the soldier’s hot forehead, or to tend him gently in those paroxysms that wrenched the clotted blood from off his lungs, there was a light on her face that did not come from the golden heat of the African sun.

Such a light those who know well 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?”