His comrade had seen the hemorrhage many times; yet now he knew, as he had never known before, that that was death.
As he held him upward in his arms, and shouted loud for help, the great luminous eyes of the French soldier looked up at him through their mist with the deep, fond gratitude that beams in the eyes of a dog as it drops down to die, knowing one touch and one voice to the last.
"You do not forsake," he murmured brokenly, while his voice ebbed faintly away as the stream of his life flowed faster and faster out.
"It is over now--so best! If only I could have seen France once more.
France----" He stretched his arms outward as he spoke, with the vain longing of a hopeless love.

Then a deep sigh quivered through his lips; his hand strove to close on the hand of his comrade, and his head fell, resting on the flushed blossoms of the rose-buds of Provence.
He was dead.
An hour later Cecil left the hospital, seeing and hearing nothing of the gay riot of the town about him, though the folds of many-colored silk and bunting fluttered across the narrow Moorish streets, and the whole of the populace was swarming through them with the vivacious enjoyment of Paris mingling with the stately, picturesque life of Arab habit and custom.

He was well used to pain of every sort; his bread had long been the bread of bitterness, and the waters of his draught been of gall.

Yet this stroke, though looked for, fell heavily and cut far.
Yonder, in the deadroom, there lay a broken, useless mass of flesh and bone that in the sight of the Bureau Arabe was only a worn-out machine that had paid its due toll to the wars of the Second Empire, and was now valueless; only fit to be cast in to rot, unmourned, in the devouring African soil.

But to him that lifeless, useless mass was dear still; was the wreck of the bravest, tenderest, and best-loved friend that he had found in his adversity.
In Leon Ramon he had found a man whom he had loved, and who had loved him.