“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 rested on the other.  They died around him every day; the fearless, fiery blood of France watered in ceaseless streams the arid, harvestless fields of northern Africa.  Death was so common that the fall of a comrade was no more noted by them than the fall of a loose stone that their horse’s foot shook down a precipice.  Yet this death was very bitter to him.  He wondered with a dull sense of aching impatience why no Bedouin bullet, no Arab saber, had ever found his own life out, and cut his thralls asunder.

The evening had just followed on the glow of the day—­evening, more lustrous even than ever, for the houses were all aglitter with endless lines of colored lamps and strings of sparkling illuminations, a very sea of bright-hued fire.  The noise, the mirth, the sudden swell of music, the pleasure-seeking crowds—­all that were about him—­served only to make more desolate and more oppressive by their contrast his memories of that life, once gracious, and gifted, and content with the dower of its youth, ruined by a woman, and now slaughtered here, for no avail and with no honor, by a lance-thrust in a midnight skirmish, which had been unrecorded even in the few lines of the gazette that chronicled the war news of Algeria.