He spoke the words out to the end—­calmly, and with unfaltering resolve.  But she saw the great dews gather on his temples, where silver threads were just glistening among the bright richness of his hair and she heard the short, low, convulsive breathing with which his chest heaved as he spoke.  She stood close beside him, and gazed once more full in his eyes, while the sweet, imperious cadence of her voice answered him: 

“There is more than I know of here.  Either you are the greatest madman, or the most generous man that ever lived.  You choose to guard your own secret; I will not seek to persuade it from you.  But tell me one thing—­why do you thus abjure your rights, permit a false charge to rest on you, and consign yourself forever to this cruel agony?”

His lips shook under his beard as he answered her.

“Because I can do no less in honor.  For God’s sake, do not you tempt me!”

“Forgive me,” she said, after a long pause.  “I will never ask you that again.”

She could honor honor too well, and too well divine all that he suffered for its sake, ever to become his temptress in bidding him forsake it; yet, with a certain weariness, a certain dread, wholly unfamiliar to her, she realized that what he had chosen was the choice not of his present or of his future.  It could have no concern for her,—­save that long years ago he had been the best-loved friend of her best-loved relative,—­whether or no he remained lost to all the world under the unknown name of a French Chasseur.  And yet it smote her with a certain dull, unanalyzed pain; it gave her a certain emotion of powerlessness and of hopelessness to realize that he would remain all his years through, until an Arab’s shot should set him free, under this bondage of renunciation, beneath this yoke of service.  She stood silent long, leaning against the oval of the casement, with the sun shed over the glowing cashmeres that swept round her.  He stood apart in silence also.  What could he say to her?  His whole heart longed with an unutterable longing to tell her the truth, and bid her be his judge between him and his duty; but his promise hung on him like a leaden weight.  He must remain speechless—­and leave her, for doubt to assail her, and for scorn to follow it in her thoughts of him, if so they would.

Heavy as had been the curse to him of that one hour in which honor had forbade him to compromise a woman’s reputation, and old tenderness had forbade him to betray a brother’s sin, he had never paid so heavy a price for his act as that which he paid now.

Through the yellow sunlight without, over the barren, dust-strewn plains, in the distance there approached three riders, accompanied by a small escort of Spahis, with their crimson burnous floating in the autumnal wind.  She started, and turned to him.

“It is Philip!  He is coming for me from your camp to-day.”

His eyes strained through the sun-glare.