leave it. Nothing more can be said."

He stood moodily over the heap of ashes. When he looked at her again,
she had risen.

"The flowers, M'sieu," she said, "you--you threw them away."

He glanced down. They lay at his feet. Silently he knelt and gathered
them.

"Will you help me, Mademoiselle? We will make another cup. And these
two large daisies,--did you see how they rested side by side on the
ground when I would have trampled on them? You will take one and I the
other; and when this day shall be far in the past, it may be that you
will remember it, and how we two were here together, waiting for the
stroke that should change life for us."

He held it out, and she, with lowered eyes, reached to take it from
his hand, but suddenly checked the motion and turned to the door.

"Will you take it, Mademoiselle?"

She did not move; and he stood, the soldier, helpless, waiting for a
word. He had forgotten everything,--the low, smoke-blackened hut, the
responsibility that lay on his shoulders, the danger of the
moment,--everything but the slender maid who stood before him, who
would not take the flower from his hand. Then he stepped to her side,
and, taking away the other flowers from the lace beneath her throat,
he placed the single daisy in their stead. Her eyes were nearly
closed, and she seemed hardly to know that he was there.

"And it may be," he whispered softly, "that we, like the flowers,
shall be spared."

She turned slowly away, and sank upon the bench. Menard, with a
strange, new lightness in his heart, went out into the sunlight.

The day wore on. The warm sunbeams, that slipped down through the
foliage, lengthened and reached farther and farther to the east. The
bright spots of light crept across the grass, climbed the side of the
hut and the tree-trunks, lingered on the upreaching twigs, and died
away in the blue sky. The evening star shot out its white spears,
glowing and radiant, long before the light had gone, or the purple and
golden afterglow had faded into twilight. Menard's mind went back to
another day, just such a glorious, shining June day as this had been,
when he had sat not a hundred yards from this spot, waiting, as now,
for the end. He looked at his fingers. They were scarred and knotted;
one drunken, frenzied squaw had mangled them with her teeth. He had
wondered then how a man could endure such torture as had come to him,
and still could live and think, could even struggle back to he