“Forgive me, for pity’s sake!  After to-night I shall never look upon your face again.”

“I do forgive,” she said gently, while her voice grew very sweet.  “You endure too much already for one needless pang to be added by me.  All I wish is that you had never met me, so that this last, worst thing had not come unto you!”

A long silence fell between them; where she leaned back among her cushions, her face was turned from him.  He stood motionless in the shadow, his head still dropped upon his breast, his breathing loud and slow and hard.  To speak of love to her was forbidden to him, yet the insidious temptation wound close and closer round his strength.  He had only to betray the man he had sworn to protect, and she would know his innocence, she would hear his passion; he would be free, and she—­he grew giddy as the thought rose before him—­she might, with time, be brought to give him other tenderness than that of friendship.  He seemed to touch the very supremacy of joy; to reach it almost with his hand; to have honors, and peace, and all the glory of her haughty loveliness, and all the sweetness of her subjugation, and all the soft delights of passions before him in their golden promise, and he was held back in bands of iron, he was driven out from them desolate and accursed.

Unlike Cain, he had suffered in his brother’s stead, yet, like Cain, he was branded and could only wander out into the darkness and the wilderness.

She watched him many minutes, he unconscious of her gaze; and while she did so, many conflicting emotions passed over the colorless delicacy of her features; her eyes were filled and shadowed with many altering thoughts; her heart was waking from its rest, and the high, generous, unselfish nature in her strove with her pride of birth, her dignity of habit.

“Wait,” she said softly, with the old imperial command of her voice subdued, though not wholly banished.  “I think you have mistaken me somewhat.  You wrong me if you think that I could be so callous, so indifferent, as to leave you here without heed as to your fate.  Believe in your innocence you know that I do, as firmly as though you substantiated it with a thousand proofs; reverence your devotion to your honor you are certain that I must, or all better things were dead in me.”

Her voice sank inaudible for the instant; she recovered her self-control with an effort.

“You reject my friendship—­you term it cruel—­but at least it will be faithful to you; too faithful for me to pass out of Africa and never give you one thought again.  I believe in you.  Do you not know that that is the highest trust, to my thinking, that one human life can show in another’s?  You decide that it is your duty not to free yourself from this bondage, not to expose the actual criminal, not to take up your rights of birth.  I dare not seek to alter that decision.  But I cannot leave you to such a future without infinite pain, and there must—­there shall be—­means through which you will let me hear of you—­through which, at least, I can know that you are living.”