“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, while over the brilliancy of her face there passed a shadow.  “There must be infinite nobility among these men, who live without hope—­live only to die.  That soldier, a day or two ago, who brought his dead comrade through the hurricane, risking his own death rather than leave the body to the carrion-birds—­you have heard of him?  What tenderness, what greatness there must have been in that poor fellow’s heart!”

“Oh, no!  That was nothing.”

“Nothing!  They have told me he came every inch of the way in danger of the Arabs’ shot and steel.  He had suffered so much to bring the body safe across the plains, he fell down insensible on his entrance here.”

“You set too much store on it.  I owed him a debt far greater than any act like that could ever repay.”

“You!  Was it you?”

“Yes, madame.  He who perished had a thousandfold more of such nobility as you have praised than I.”

“Ah!  Tell me of him,” she said simply; but he saw that the lustrous eyes bent on him had a grave, sweet sadness in them that was more precious and more pitiful than a million utterances of regret could ever have been.

Those belied her much who said that she was heartless; though grief had never touched her, she could feel keenly the grief of other lives.  He obeyed her bidding now, and told her, in brief words, the story, which had a profound pathos spoken there, where without, through the oval, unglazed casement in the distance, there was seen the tall, dark, leaning pine that overhung the grave of yesternight—­the story over which his voice oftentimes fell with the hush of a cruel pain in it, and which he could have related to no other save herself.  It had an intense melancholy and a strange beauty in its brevity and its simplicity, told in that gaunt, still, darkened chamber of the caravanserai, with the gray gloom of its stone walls around, and the rays of the golden sunlight from without straying in to touch the glistening hair of the proud head that bent forward to listen to the recital.  Her face grew paler as she heard, and a mist was over the radiance of her azure eyes; that death in the loneliness of the plains moved her deeply with the grand simplicity of its unconscious heroism.  And, though he spoke little of himself, she felt, with all the divination of a woman’s sympathies, how he who told her this thing had suffered by it—­suffered far more than the comrade whom he had laid down in the grave where, far off in the noonday warmth, the young goats were at rest on the sod.  When he ceased, there was a long silence; he had lost even the memory of her in the memory of the death that he had painted to her; and she was moved with that wondering pain, that emotion, half dread and half regret, with which the contemplation of calamities that have never touched, and that can never touch them, will move women far more callous, far more world-chilled than herself.