A step sounded on the bare boards; she looked up; and the wounded man
raised his weary lids with a gleam of gladness under them; Cecil bent
above his couch.
"Dear Leon! How is it with you?"
His voice was softened to infinite tenderness; Leon Ramon had been for
many a year his comrade and his friend; an artist of Paris, a man of
marvelous genius, of high idealic creeds, who, in a fatal moment of rash
despair, had flung his talents, his broken fortunes, his pure and noble
spirit, into the fiery furnace of the hell of military Africa; and now
lay dying here, a common soldier, forgotten as though he were already in
his grave.
"The review is just over. I got ten minutes to spare, and came to you
the instant I could," pursued Cecil. "See here what I bring you! You,
with your artist's soul, will feel yourself all but well when you look
on these!"
He spoke with a hopefulness he could never feel, for he knew that the
life of Leon Ramon was doomed; and as the other strove to gain breath
enough to answer him, he gently motioned him to silence, and placed
on his bed some peaches bedded deep in moss and circled round with
stephanotis, with magnolia, with roses, with other rarer flowers still.
The face of the artist-soldier lightened with a longing joy; his lips
quivered.
"Ah, God! they have the fragrance of my France!"
Cecil said nothing, but moved them nearer in to the clasp of hie eager
hands. Cigarette he did not see.
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