"Separate grave ... marked to find easily. All respect ... answer to me!"
More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing. For God had remembered her, and sent her tears at last.
She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of France, at Metz. And the intuition of love told her that the dead man must have carried this, the last message received from his daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed it—as in very truth we know he had—shortly before he died.
"See, see, my friend! Behold my own letter. His sacred blood has stained it.... His lips perhaps have pressed it!—it well may be that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me until my hand is cold as this is! Adieu, dear hand!" She knelt down to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force—would have returned for a last caress—a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her away.
"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested. "See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think it convenable that a gentleman should carry a lady so!..."
Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant. As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.
What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing in his arms his worshiped lady? He was footsore and aching in every bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion. His heart pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright. Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer. And as he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood burgeoned into flower. He might look back upon his boyhood with regret, contempt, or tenderness.... He would never be a boy again.
L
The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly heavy, when carried in the arms of a lover who long has borne her in his heart.