bosom, a hot, scarlet flush came over her
cheeks as she felt his touch, and rested on his heart.

"A life! what is it to give? We hold it in our hands every hour, we
soldiers, and toss it in change for a draught of wine. Lay me down on
the ground--at your feet--so! I shall live longest that way, and I have
much to tell. How they crowd around me! Mes soldats, do not make that
grief and that rage over me. They are sorry they fired; that is foolish.
They were only doing their duty, and they could not hear me in time."

But the brave words could not console those who had killed the Child of
the Tricolor; they flung their carbines away, they beat their breasts,
they cursed themselves and the mother who had borne them; the silent,
rigid, motionless phalanx that had stood there in the dawn to see
death dealt in the inexorable penalty of the law was broken up into a
tumultuous, breathless, heart-stricken, infuriated throng, maddened with
remorse, convulsed with sorrow, turning wild eyes of hate on him as on
the cause through which their darling had been stricken. He, laying her
down with unspeakable gentleness as she had bidden him, hung over her,
leaning her head against his arm, and watching in paralyzed horror
the helplessness of the quivering limbs, the slow flowing of the blood
beneath the Cross that shone where that young heroic heart so soon would
beat no more.

"Oh, my child, my child!" he moaned, as the full might and meaning of
this devotion which had saved him at such cost rushed on him. "What am
I worth that you should perish for me? Better a thousand times have left
me to my fate! Such nobility, such sacrifice, such love!"

The hot color flushed her face once more; she was strong to the last to
conceal that passion for which she was still content to perish in her
youth.

"Chut! We are comrades, and you are a brave man. I would do the same for
any of my Spahis. Look you, I never heard of your arrest till I heard,
too, of your sentence----"

She paused a moment, and her features grew white and quivered with pain
and with the oppression that seemed to lie like lead upon her chest. But
she forced herself to be stronger than the anguish which assailed her
strength; and she motioned them all to be silent as she spoke on while
her voice still should serve her.

"They will tell you how I did it--I have not time. The Marshal gave his
word you shall be saved; there is no fear. That is your friend who bends
over me he