"Yes; fourteen days and fourteen nights."
"Ah, how can I ever repay all this?"
"By trying to sleep, and sleep you must," said she; then laying my head gently on the pillow, she withdrew her arm, and closing my eyelids playfully with her fingers, said again in my ear, "Sleep;" and adding, "Père Celestine tells us that St. Paul said 'all kisses were not holy,' but there can be no harm in these." And touching each eyelid with her cherry lip, she patted me on the cheek and glided away.
But the tumult of thought banished sleep, and indeed she left me very much awake.
CHAPTER V.
NEWS OF THE ARMY.
For two days that succeeded, the kindness and attention of my little French nurse were undiminished, and on the third a soft dressing-gown was brought to me, and I found myself seated in an easy-chair at the open window, with a view of the distant hills, and in a fair way to convalescence.
Was the pretty soubrette in love with me, or was her peculiar manner merely the impulsive nature of the Breton, together with genuine pity for a helpless fellow-creature—a poor young soldier—whom she had nursed? Of course it was, for otherwise she would not have spoken so frankly or so frequently of her lover, Jacquot Tricot.
Notwithstanding the favours then heaped on me by fortune, such is the perversity of human nature, that instead of being grateful for them, at times, as I lay there, helpless, wounded, weary and alone, thinking of the past, of what I was, and what I should have been, something of the sullenness of despair stole into my heart, and I actually longed for death to rid me of all further trouble, or care for the future. But to die there unknown, and so far, far away from the sequestered churchyard, where in a pastoral glen upon the Scottish Border, my father and mother lay side by side, with the green mounds that covered them within sound of the silver Tweed, was not the end I had so long anticipated.
Though a soldier, I was but a boy; and amid my loneliness in that foreign land, I wept for the mother of whom I had known so little, and hoped that from her place in heaven she was watching over me, and perhaps could see me there.