“Cela vous fait beaucoup souffrir, mon pauvre ami?” said Corinna.
He shook his head. “Not now that you are here. It is wonderful of you to come. You have a heart of gold. And it is that little talisman, ce petit cœur d’or, that is going to make me well. You cannot imagine—it is like a fairy tale to see you here.”
Instinctively Corinna put out her hand and touched his lips. She had never done so feminine and tender a thing to a man. She let her fingers remain, while he kissed them. She flushed and smiled.
“You mustn’t talk. It is for me who have sound lungs. I have come because I have been a little imbecile, and only at the eleventh hour I have repented of my folly. If I had been sensible a year ago, this would not have happened.”
He turned happy eyes on her; but he said with his Frenchman’s clear logic:
“All my love and all the happiness that might have been would not have altered the destinies of Europe. I should have been brought here, all the same, with a ridiculous little hole through my great body.”
Corinna admitted the truth of his statement. “But,” said she, “I might have been of some comfort to you.”
His eyebrows expressed the shrug of which his maimed frame was incapable. “It is all for the best. If I had left you at Brantôme, my heart would have been torn in two. I might have been cautious to the detriment of France. As it was, I didn’t care much what happened to me. And now they have awarded me the médaille militaire; and you are here, to make, as Baudelaire says, ‘ma joie et ma santé.’ What more can a man desire?”
Now all this bravery was spoken in a voice so weak that the woman in Corinna was stirred to its depths. She bent over him and whispered—for she knew that the man with the wistful gaze in the next bed was listening:
“C’est vrai que tu m’aimes toujours?”