There were many emotions at war in him—­scorn, and pity, and wounded love, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude denied, or quote a sacrifice that was almost without parallel in generosity, all held him speechless.  To overwhelm the sinner before him with reproaches, to count and claim the immeasurable debts due to him, to upbraid and to revile the wretched weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not his own to rest upon him—­to do aught of this was not in him.  Long ago he had accepted the weight of an alien crime, and borne it as his own; to undo now all that he had done in the past, to fling out to ruin now the one whom he had saved at such a cost; to turn, after twelve years, and forsake the man, all coward though he was, whom he had shielded for so long—­this was not possible to him.  Though it would be but his own birthright that he would demand, his own justification that he would establish, it would have seemed to him like a treacherous and craven thing.  No matter that the one for whom the sacrifice had been made was unworthy of it, he held that every law of honor and justice forbade him now to abandon his brother and yield him up to the retribution of his early fault.  It might have been a folly in the first instance; it might even have been a madness, that choice of standing in his brother’s place to receive the shame of his brother’s action; but it had been done so long before—­done on the spur of generous affection, and actuated by the strange hazard that made the keeping of a woman’s secret demand the same reticence which also saved the young lad’s name; to draw back from it now would have been a cowardice impossible to his nature.

All seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one another.  He could not speak with tenderness to this craven who had been false to the fair repute of their name—­and he would not speak with harshness.  He felt too sick at heart, too weary, too filled with pain, to ask aught of his brother’s life.  It had been saved from temptation, and therefore saved from evil; that knowledge sufficed to him.

The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened.  In the many years that had passed by, although his character had not changed, his position had altered greatly; and in the last few months he had enjoyed all the power that wealth and independence and the accession to his title could bestow.  He felt some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to him by the fact that the rightful heir of them still lived; some chafing, ingrate, and unreasoning impatience with the savior of his whole existence; some bitter pangs of conscience that he would be baser yet, base beyond all baseness, to remain in his elder’s place, and accept this sacrifice still, while knowing now the truth.