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?”