Cecil’s hand fell from his shoulder.  There was that in the words which smote him more cruelly than any Arab steel could have done; there was the accent of regret.

“I am dead,” he said simply; “dead to the world and you.”

He who bore the title of Royallieu covered his face.

“How have you lived?” he whispered hoarsely.

“Honorably.  Let that suffice.  And you?”

The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal—­the old, timorous, terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the boy’s face, strangely returning on the gracious and mature beauty of the man.

“In honor too, I swear!  That was my first disgrace, and my last.  You bore the weight of my shame?  Good God, what can I say?  Such nobility, such sacrifice——­”

He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy the one who had lost all for his sake, had there but been once in his voice no fear, but only love.  As it was, that which he still thought of was himself alone.  While crushed with the weight of his brother’s surpassing generosity, he still was filled with only one thought that burned through the darkness of his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own jeopardy.  Even in the very first hours of his knowledge that the man whom he had believed dead was living—­living and bearing the burden of the guilt he should have borne—­what he was filled with was the imminence of his own peril.

Cecil stood in silence, looking at him.  He saw the boyish loveliness he remembered so well altered into the stronger and fuller beauty of the man.  He saw that life had gone softly, smoothly, joyously, with this weak and feminine nature; and that, in the absence of temptation to evil, its career had been fair and straight in the sight of the world.  He saw that his brother had been, in one word, happy.  He saw that happiness had done for this character what adversity had done for his own.  He saw that by it had been saved a temperament that calamity would have wrecked.  He stood and looked at him, but he spoke not one word; whatever he felt, he restrained from all expression.

The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, even in those pale, gray moonbeams, he shunned the light that was about him.

“We believed you were dead,” he murmured wildly.  “They said so; there seemed every proof.  But when I saw you yesterday, I knew you—­I knew you, though you passed me as a stranger.  I stayed on here; they told me you would return.  God! what agony this day and night have been!”

Cecil was silent still; he knew that this agony had been the dread lest he should be living.