He passed under the shadow of the gateway arch—­a shadow black and intense against the golden light which, with the ceasing of the storm, flooded the land in the full morning.  There were movement, noise, changes, haste in the entrance.  Besides the arrival of the detachment of the line and a string of northward-bound camels, the retinue of some travelers of rank was preparing for departure, and the resources of the humble caravanserai were taxed beyond their powers.  The name that some of the hurrying grooms shouted loudly in their impatience broke through his stupor and reached him.  It was that of the woman whom, however madly, he loved with all the strength of a passion born out of utter hopelessness.  He turned to the outrider nearest him: 

“You are of the Princesse Corona’s suite?  What does she do here?”

“Madame travels to see the country and the war.”

“The war?  This is no place for her.  The land is alive with danger—­rife with death.”

“Milady travels with M. le Duc, her brother.  Milady does not know what fear is.”

“But——­”

The remonstrance died on his lips; he stood gazing out from the gloom of the arch at a face close to him, on which the sun shone full, a face unseen for twelve long years, and which, a moment before laughing and careless in the light, changed and grew set, and rigid, and pale with the pallor of an unutterable horror.  His own flushed, and moved, and altered with a wholly different emotion—­emotion that was, above all, of an intense and yearning tenderness.  For a moment both stood motionless and speechless; then, with a marvelous self-command and self-restraint, Cecil brought his hand to his brow in military salute, passed with the impassiveness of a soldier who passed a gentleman, reached his charger, and rode away upon his errand over the brown and level ground.

He had known his brother in that fleeting glance, but he hoped that his brother would see no more in him than a French trooper who bore resemblance by a strange hazard to one long believed to be dead and gone.  The instinct of generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, moved him now as, long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sin of his mother’s darling as his own.

Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, never came to him as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay between him and his goal.  His one impulse had been to spare the other from the knowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness and the bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier’s grave.

Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were in the tent of the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, and he himself returned to the caravanserai to fulfill with his own hand to the dead those last offices which he would delegate to none.  It was night when he arrived; all was still and deserted.  He inquired if the party of tourists was gone; they answered him in the affirmative; there only remained the detachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for a while.