Had she been kept in ignorance of the accusation beneath which his flight had been made?  He began to think so.  It was possible.  She had been so young a child when he had left for Africa; then the story was probably withheld from reaching her; and now, what memory had the world to give a man whose requiem it had said twelve long years before?  In all likelihood she had never heard his name, save from her brother’s lips, that had been silent on the shame of his old comrade.

“Leave my life alone, for God’s sake!” he said passionately.  “Tell me of your own—­tell me, above all, of his.  He loved me, you say?—­O Heaven! he did!  Better than any creature that ever breathed; save the man whose grave lies yonder.”

“He does so still,” she answered eagerly.  “Philip’s is not a heart that forgets.  It is a heart of gold, and the name of his earliest friend is graven on it as deeply now as ever.  He thinks you dead; to-night will be the happiest hour he had ever known when he shall meet you here.”

He rose hastily, and moved thrice to and fro the narrow floor whose rugged earth had been covered with furs and rugs lest it should strike a chill to her as she passed over it; the torture grew unsupportable to him.  And yet, it had so much of sweetness that he was powerless to end it—­sweetness in the knowledge that she knew him now her equal, at least by birth; in the change that it had made in her voice and her glance, while the first grew tender with olden memories, and the last had the smile of friendship; in the closeness of the remembrances that seemed to draw and bind them together; in the swift sense that in an instant, by the utterance of a name, the ex-barrier of caste which had been between them had fallen now and forever.

She watched him with grave, musing eyes.  She was moved, startled, softened to a profound pity for him, and filled with a wondering of regret; yet a strong emotion of relief, of pleasure, rose above these.  She had never forgotten the man to whom, in her childish innocence, she had brought the gifts of her golden store; she was glad that he lived, though he lived thus, glad with a quicker, warmer, more vivid emotion than any that had ever occupied her for any man living or dead except her brother.  The interest she had vaguely felt in a stranger’s fortunes, and which she had driven contemptuously away as unworthy of her harboring, was justified for one whom her people had known and valued while she had been in her infancy, and of whom she had never heard from her brother’s lips aught except constant regret and imperishable attachment.  For it was true, as Cecil divined, that the dark cloud under which his memory had passed to all in England had never been seen by her eyes, from which, in childhood, it had been screened, and, in womanhood, withheld, because his name had been absolutely forgotten by all save the Seraph, to whom it had been fraught with too much pain for its utterance to be ever voluntary.