But the brave words could not console those who had killed the Child of the Tricolor; 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 paralyzed 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 color 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; and she motioned them all to be silent as she spoke on while her voice still should serve her.

“They will tell you how I did it—­I have not time.  The Marshal gave his word you shall be saved; there is no fear.  That is your friend who bends over me here?—­is it not?  A fair face, a brave face!  You will go back to your land—­you will live among your own people—­and she, she will love you now—­now she knows you are of her Order!”

Something of the old thrill of jealous dread and hate quivered through the words, but the purer nobler nature vanquished it; she smiled up in his eyes, heedless of the tumult round them.

“You will be happy.  That is well.  Look you—­it is nothing that I did.  I would have done it for any one of my soldiers.  And for this”—­she touched the blood flowing from her side with the old, bright, brave smile—­“it was an accident; they must not grieve for it.  My men are good to me; they will feel much regret and remorse; but do not let them.  I am glad to die.”