She heard him silently, with her grand, meditative eyes, in which the slow tears still floated, fixed upon him.  Most women would have thought that conscious guilt spoke in the violence of his self-accusation; she did not.  Her intuition was too fine, her sympathies too true.  She felt that he feared, not that she should unjustly think him guilty, but that she should justly think him guiltless.  She knew that this, whatever its root might be, was the fear of the stainless, not of the criminal life.

“I hear you,” she answered him gently; “but I do not believe you, even against yourself.  The man whom Philip loved and honored never sank to the base fraud of a thief.”

Her glorious eyes were still on him as she spoke, seeming to read his very soul.  Under that glance all the manhood, all the race, all the pride, and the love, and the courage within him refused to bear in her sight the shame of an alien crime, and rose in revolt to fling off the bondage that forced him to stand as a criminal before the noble gaze of this woman.  His eyes met hers full, and rested on them without wavering; his head was raised, and his carriage had a fearless dignity.

“No.  I was innocent.  But in honor I must bear the yoke that I took on me long ago; in honor I can never give you or any living soul the proof that this crime was not mine.  I thought that I should go to my grave without any ever hearing of the years that I have passed in Africa, without any ever learning the name I used to bear.  As it is, all I can ask is now—­to be forgotten.”

His voice fell before the last words, and faltered over them.  It was bitter to ask only for oblivion from the woman whom he loved with all the strength of a sudden passion born in utter hopelessness; the woman whose smile, whose beauty, whose love might even possibly have been won as his own in the future, if he could have claimed his birthright.  So bitter that, rather than have spoken those words of resignation, he would have been led out by a platoon of his own soldiery and shot in the autumn sunlight beside Rake’s grave.

“You ask what will not be mine to give,” she answered him, while a great weariness stole through her own words, for she was bewildered, and pained, and oppressed with a new, strange sense of helplessness before this man’s nameless suffering.  “Remember—­I knew you so well in my earliest years, and you are so dear to the one dearest to me.  It will not be possible to forget such a meeting as this.  Silence, of course, you can command from me, if you insist on it; but—­”

“I command nothing from you; but I implore it.  It is the sole mercy you can show.  Never, for God’s sake! speak of me to your brother or to mine.”

“Do you so mistrust Philip’s affection?”

“No.  It is because I trust it too entirely.”

“Too entirely to do what?”

“To deal it fruitless pain.  As you love him—­as you pity me—­pray that he and I never meet!”