She was pale still; and her eyes were fixed on him with a gaze that recalled to him the look with which “Petite Reine” had promised that summer day to keep his secret, and tell none of that misery of which she had been witness.

“They thought that you were dead,” she said at length, while her voice sank very low.  “Why have you lived like this?”

He made no answer.

“It was cruel to Philip,” she went on, while her voice still shook.  “Child though I was, I remember his passion of grief when the news came that you had lost your life.  He has never forgotten you.  So often now he will still speak of you!  He is in your camp.  We are traveling together.  He will be here this evening.  What delight it will give him to know his dearest friend is living!  But why—­why—­have kept him ignorant, if you were lost to all the world beside?”

Still he answered her nothing.  The truth he could not tell; the lie he would not.  She paused, waiting reply.  Receiving none, she spoke once more, her words full of that exquisite softness which was far more beautiful in her than in women less tranquil, less chill, and less negligent in ordinary moments.

“Mr. Cecil, I divined rightly!  I knew that you were far higher than your grade in Africa; I felt that in all things, save in some accident of position, we were equals.  But why have you condemned yourself to this misery?  Your life is brave, is noble, but it must be a constant torture to such as you?  I remember well what you were—­so well, that I wonder we have never recognized each other before now.  The existence you lead in Algeria must be very terrible to you, though it is greater, in truth, than your old years of indolence.”

He sank down beside her on a low seat, and bowed his head on his hands for some moments.  He knew that he must leave this woman whom he loved, and who knew him now as one whom in her childhood she had seen caressed and welcomed by all her race, to hold him guilty of this wretched, mean, and fraudulent thing, under whose charge he had quitted her country.  Great dews of intense pain gathered on his forehead; his whole mind, and heart, and soul revolted against this brand of a guilt not his own that was stamped on him; he could have cried out to her the truth in all the eloquence of a breaking heart.

But he knew that his lips had been sealed by his own choice forever; and the old habits of his early life were strong upon him still.  He lifted his head and spoke gently, and very quietly, though she caught the tremor that shook through the words.

“Do not let us speak of myself.  You see what my life is; there is no more to be said.  Tell me rather of your own story—­you are no longer the Lady Venetia?  You have been wedded and widowed, they say?”

“The wife of an hour—­yes!  But it is of yourself that I would hear.  Why have left the world, and, above all, why have left us, to think you dead?  I was not so young when we last saw you, but that I remember well how all my people loved you.”