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:
She saw her question answered by the quick illumination of his eyes, and she went on quickly: “And I, I love you too, and I will give you all my poor life for what it is worth. Oh!” she cried, “I can’t imagine what you can see in me. Beside you I feel so small, of so little account. I can do nothing—nothing but love you.”
“That’s everything in the world,” said Bigourdin.
They were silent for a moment. Then he said: “I should like to meet the _Boche_ who fired that rifle.”
“So should I,” she cried fiercely. “I should like to tear him limb from limb.”
“I shouldn’t,” said Bigourdin. “I should like to decorate him with a pair of wings and a little bow and arrow. . . .”
The nurse came up. “You must go now, mademoiselle. The patient is becoming too excited. It is not your fault. Nothing but a bolster across their mouths will prevent these Périgordins from talking.”