He lifted his head and looked her full in the eyes; her own closed involuntarily, and filled with tears.  She felt that the despair and the patience of that look would haunt her until her dying day.

“I was guiltless; but none could credit it then; none would do so now; nor can I seek to make them.  Ask me no more; give me your belief, if you can—­God knows what precious mercy it is to me; but leave me to fulfill my fate, and tell no living creature what I have told you now.”

The great tears stood in her eyes, and blinded her as she heard.  Even in the amaze and the vagueness of this first knowledge of the cause of his exile she felt instinctively, as the Little One also had done, that some great sacrifice, some great fortitude and generosity, lay within this sealed secret of his sufferance of wrong.  She knew, too, that it would be useless to seek to learn that which he had chosen to conceal; that for no slender cause could he have come out to lead this life of whose sufferings she could gauge the measure; that nothing save some absolute and imperative reason could have driven him to accept such living death as was his doom in Africa.

“Tell no one!” she echoed.  “What! not Philip even?  Not your oldest friend.  Ah! be sure, whatever the evidence might be against you, his heart never condemned you for one instant.”

“I believe it.  Yet all you can do for me, all I implore you to do for me, is to keep silence forever on my name.  To-day, accident has made me break a vow I never thought but to keep sacred.  When you recognized me, I could not deny myself, I could not lie to you; but, for God’s sake, tell none of what has passed between us!”

“But why?” she pursued—­“why?  You lie under this charge still—­you cannot disprove it, you say; but why not come out before the world, and state to all what you swear now to me, and claim your right to bear your father’s honors?  If you were falsely accused, there must have been some guilty in your stead; and if—­”

“Cease, for pity’s sake!  Forget I ever told you I was guiltless!  Blot my memory out; think of me as dead, as I have been, till your eyes called me back to life.  Think that I am branded with the theft of your brother’s name; think that I am vile, and shameless and fallen as the lowest wretch that pollutes this army; think of me as what you will, but not as innocent!”

The words broke out in a torrent from him, bearing down with them all his self-control, as the rush of waters bears away all barriers that have long dammed their course.  They were wild, passionate, incoherent; unlike any that had ever passed his lips, or been poured out in her presence.  He felt mad with the struggle that tore him asunder, the longing to tell the truth to her, though he should never after look upon her face again, and the honor which bound silence on him for sake of the man whom he had sworn under no temptation to dispossess and to betray.