“My darling! my darling! what have I done to be worthy of such love?” he murmured while the tears fell from his blinded eyes, and his head drooped until his lips met hers. At the first utterance of that word between them, at the unconscious tenderness of his kisses that had the anguish of a farewell in them, the color suddenly flushed all over her blanched face; she trembled in his arms; and a great, shivering sigh ran through her. It came too late, this warmth of love. She learned what its sweetness might have been only when her lips grew numb, and her eyes sightless, and her heart without pulse, and her senses without consciousness.
“Hush!” she answered, with a look that pierced his soul. “Keep those kisses for Milady. She will have the right to love you; she is of your 'aristocrats,' she is not 'unsexed.' As for me—I am only a little trooper who has saved my comrade! My soldiers, come round me one instant; I shall not long find words.”
Her eyes closed as she spoke; a deadly faintness and coldness passed over her; and she gasped for breath. A moment, and the resolute courage in her conquered; her eyes opened and rested on the war-worn faces of her “children”—rested in a long, last look of unspeakable wistfulness and tenderness.
“I cannot speak as I would,” she said at length, while her voice grew very faint. “But I have loved you. All is said!”
All was uttered in those four brief words. “She had loved them.” The whole story of her young life was told in the single phrase. And the gaunt, battle-scarred, murderous, ruthless veterans of Africa who heard her could have turned their weapons against their own breasts, and sheathed them there, rather than have looked on to see their darling die.
“I have been too quick in anger sometimes—forgive it,” she said gently. “And do not fight and curse among yourselves; it is bad amid brethren. Bury my Cross with me, if they will let you; and let the colors be over my grave, if you can. Think of me when you go into battle; and tell them in France——”
For the first time her eyes filled with great tears as the name of her beloved land paused upon her lips. She stretched her arms out with a gesture of infinite longing, like a lost child that vainly seeks its mother.
“If I could only see France once more! France——”
It was the last word upon her utterance; her eyes met Cecil's in one fleeting, upward glance of unutterable tenderness, then, with her hands still stretched out westward to where her country was, and with the dauntless heroism of her smile upon her face like light, she gave a tired sigh as of a child that sinks to sleep, and in the midst of her Army of Africa the Little One lay dead.
In the shadow of his tent, at midnight he whom she had rescued stood looking down at a bowed, stricken form before him with an exceeding, yearning pity in his gaze.