It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the great stars shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that they made the single grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with the somber fans of a pine spread above it, and nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats.  The sullen echo of the soldiers’ muskets gave its only funeral requiem; and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time would come and play, and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod, its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains.

When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once again to rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone.  Thrown down upon the grave, he never moved as hour after hour went by.  To others that lonely and unnoticed tomb would be as nothing; only one among the thousand marks left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savage lusts of war.  But to him it held all that had bound him to his lost youth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of the years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night.  This man had followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished, unavenged!  It seemed to him like murder—­murder with which his own hand was stained.

The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had succeeded to the storm of the past day there was not a sound except the bleating of the young goats straying from the herd.  He lay prostrate under the black lengths of the pine; the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him; a grief, acute as remorse, consumed him for the man who, following his fate, had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the land of his exile.

He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as through the silence he heard a name whispered—­the name of his childhood, of his past.

He sprang to this feet, and as he turned in the moonlight he saw once more his brother’s face, pale as the face of the dead, and strained with an agonizing dread.  Concealment was no longer possible.  The younger man knew that the elder lived; knew it by a strange and irresistible certainty that needed no proof, that left no place for hope or fear in its chill, leaden, merciless conviction.

For some moments neither spoke.  A flood of innumerable memories choked thought or word in both.  They knew each other—­all was said in that.

Cecil was the first to break the silence.  He moved nearer with a rapid movement, and his hand fell heavily on the other’s shoulder.

“Have you lived stainlessly since?”

The question was stern as the demand of a judge.  His brother shuddered beneath this touch, and covered his face with his hands.

“God is my witness, yes!  But you—­you—­they said that you were dead!”