She stretched her hands toward him with that same gesture with which she had first declared her faith in his guiltlessness; the tears trembled in her voice and swam in her eyes.  As she had said, she suffered for him exceedingly.  He, hearing those words which breathed the only pity that had ever humiliated him, and the loyal trust which was but the truer because the sincerity of faith in lieu of the insanity of love dictated it, made a blind, staggering, unconscious movement of passionate, dumb agony.  He seized her hands in his and held them close against his breast one instant, against the loud, hard panting of his aching heart.

“God reward you!  God keep you!  If I stay, I shall tell you all.  Let me go, and forget that we ever met!  I am dead—­let me be dead to you!”

With another instant he had left the tent and passed out into the red glow of the torchlit evening.  And Venetia Corona dropped her proud head down upon the silken cushions where his own had rested, and wept as women weep over their dead—­in such a passion as had never come to her in all the course of her radiant, victorious, and imperious life.

It seemed to her as if she had seen him slain in cold blood, and had never lifted her hand or her voice against his murder.

His voice rang in her ear; his face was before her with its white, still, rigid anguish; the burning accents of his avowal of love seemed to search her very heart.  If this man perished in any of the thousand perils of war she would forever feel herself his assassin.  She had his secret, she had his soul, she had his honor in her hands; and she could do nothing better for them both than to send him from her to eternal silence, to eternal solitude!

Her thoughts grew unbearable; she rose impetuously from her couch and paced to and fro in the narrow confines of her tent.  Her tranquillity was broken down; her pride was abandoned; her heart, at length, was reached and sorely wounded.  The only man she had ever found, whom it would have been possible to her to have loved, was one already severed from her by a fate almost more hideous than death.

And yet, in her loneliness, the color flushed back into her face; her eyes gathered some of their old light; one dreaming, shapeless fancy floated vaguely through her mind.

If, in the years to come, she knew him in all ways worthy, and learned to give him back this love he bore her, it was in her to prove that love, no matter what cost to her pride and her lineage.  If his perfect innocence were made clear in her own sight, there was greatness and there was unselfishness enough in her nature to make her capable of regarding alone his martyrdom and his heroism, and disregarding the opinion of the world.  If, hereafter, she grew to find his presence the necessity of her life, and his sacrifice of that nobility and of that purity she now believed it, she—­proud as she was with the twin pride of lineage and of nature—­would