“Hush, for pity’s sake!  Have you never heard—­have none ever told you——­”

“What?”

Her face grew paler with a vague sense of fear; she knew that he had been equable and resolute under the severest tests that could try the strength and the patience of man, and she knew, therefore, that no slender thing could agitate and could unman him thus.

“What is it I should have heard?” she asked him, as he kept his silence.

He turned from her so that she could not see his face.

“That, when I became dead to the world, I died with the taint of crime on me!”

“Of crime?”

An intense horror thrilled through the echo of the word; but she rose, and moved, and faced him with the fearless resolve of a woman whom no half-truth would blind, and no shadowy terror appall.

“Of crime?  What crime?”

Then, and then only, he looked at her, a strange, fixed, hopeless, yet serene look, that she knew no criminal ever would or could have given.

“I was accused of having forged your brother’s name.”

A faint cry escaped her; her lips grew white, and her eyes darkened and dilated.

“Accused.  But wrongfully?”

His breath came and went in quick, sharp spasms.

“I could not prove that.”

“Not prove it?  Why?”

“I could not.”

“But he—­Philip—­never believed you guilty?”

“I cannot tell.  He may; he must.”

“But you are not!”

It was not an interrogation, but an affirmation that rang out in the silver clearness of her voice.  There was not a single intonation of doubt in it; there was rather a haughty authority that forbade even himself to say that one of his race and that one of his Order could have been capable of such ignoble and craven sin.

His mouth quivered, a bitter sigh broke from him; he turned his eyes on her with a look that pierced her to the heart.

“Think me guilty or guiltless, as you will; I cannot answer you.”

His last words were suffocated with the supreme anguish of their utterance.  As she heard it, the generosity, the faith, the inherent justice, and the intrinsic sweetness that were latent in her beneath the negligence and the chillness of external semblance rose at once to reject the baser, to accept the nobler, belief offered to her choice.  She had lived much in the world, but it had not corroded her; she had acquired keen discernment from it, but she had preserved all the courageous and the chivalrous instincts of her superb nature.  She looked at him now, and stretched her hands out toward him with a royal and gracious gesture of infinite eloquence.

“You are guiltless, whatever circumstance may have arrayed against you, whatever shadow of evil may have fallen falsely on you.  Is it not so?”

He bowed his head low over her hands as he took them.  In that moment half the bitterness of his doom passed from him; he had at least her faith.  But his face was bloodless as that of a corpse, and the loud beatings of his heart were audible on the stillness.  This faith must live on without one thing to show that he deserved it; if, in time to come, it should waver and fall, and leave him in the darkness of the foul suspicion under which he dwelt, what wonder would there be?