“Bertie—­Bertie!” he stammered, in hurried appeal—­and the name of his youth touched the hearer of it strangely, making him for the moment forget all save that he looked once more upon one of his own race—­“on my soul, I never doubted that the story of your death was true.  No one did.  All the world believed it.  If I had known you lived, I would have said that you were innocent; I would—­I would have told them how I forged your friend’s name and your own when I was so desperate that I scarce knew what I did.  But they said that you were killed, and I thought then—­then—­it was not worth while; it would have broken my father’s heart.  God help me!  I was a coward!”

He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one.  Herein lay the whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, and his ingratitude.  Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist where craven selfishness holds reign; yet there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn that moved him.  After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroic endurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he had learned to take as his daily portion, this feebleness and fear roused his wondering compassion almost as a woman’s weakness would have done.  Still he never answered.  The hatred of the stain that had been brought upon their name by his brother’s deed (stain none the less dark, in his sight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from this man, who was the only creature of their race who ever had turned poltroon, the thousand remembrances of childhood that uprose before him, the irresistible yearning for some word from the other’s lips that should tell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough to kill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril—­all these kept him silent.

His brother misinterpreted that silence.

“I am in your power—­utterly in your power,” he moaned in his fear.  “I stand in your place; I bear your title; you know that our father and our brother are dead?  All I have inherited is yours.  Do you know that, since you have never claimed it?”

“I know it.”

“And you have never come forward to take your rights?”

“What I did not do to clear my own honor, I was not likely to do merely to hold a title.”

The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which his words fell; it was too high to be comprehended by the lower nature.  The man who lived in prosperity and peace, and in the smile of the world, and the purple of power, looked bewildered at the man who led the simple, necessitous, perilous, semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Franco soldier.

“But—­great Heaven!—­this life of yours?  It must be wretchedness?”

“Perhaps.  It has at least no disgrace in it.”

The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had suffered himself to show.  It stung down to his listener’s soul.

“No—­no!” he murmured.  “You are happier than I. You have no remorse to bear!  And yet—­to tell the world that I am guilty——­”