Chateauroy wrenched his wrist out of the hold that crushed it, and drew his pistol.  Cecil knew that the laws of active service would hold him but justly dealt with if the shot laid him dead in that instant for his act and his words.

“You can kill me—­I know it.  Well, use your prerogative; it will be the sole good you have ever done to me.”

And he stood erect, patient, motionless, looking into his chief’s eyes with a calm disdain, with an unuttered challenge that, for the first moment, wrung something of savage respect and of sullen admiration out from the soul of his great foe.

He did not fire; it was the only time in which any trait of abstinence from cruelty had been ever seen in him.  He signed to the soldiers of the guard with one hand, while with the other he still covered with his pistol the man whom martial law would have allowed him to have shot down, or have cut down, at his horse’s feet.

“Arrest him,” he said simply.

Cecil offered no resistance; he let them seize and disarm him without an effort at the opposition which could have been but a futile, unavailing trial of brute force.  He dreaded lest there should be one sound that should reach her in that tent where the triad of standards drooped in the dusky distance.  He had been, moreover, too long beneath the yoke of that despotic and irresponsible authority to waste breath or to waste dignity in vain contest with the absolute and the immutable.  He was content with what he had done—­content to have met once, not as soldier to chief, but as man to man, the tyrant who held his fate.

For once, beneath the spur of that foul outrage to the dignity and the innocence of the woman he had quitted, he had allowed a passionate truth to force its way through the barriers of rank and the bonds of subservience.  Insult to himself he had borne as the base prerogative of his superior, but insult to her he had avenged with the vengeance of equal to equal, of the man who loved on the man who calumniated her.

And as he sat in the darkness of the night with the heavy tramp of his guards forever on his ear, there was peace rather than rebellion in his heart—­the peace of one heartsick with strife and with temptation, who beholds in death a merciful ending to the ordeal of existence.  “I shall die in her cause at least,” he thought.  “I could be content if I were only sure that she would never know.”

For this was the chief dread which hung on him, that she should ever know, and in knowing, suffer for his sake.

The night rolled on, the army around him knew nothing of what had happened.  Chateauroy, conscious of his own coarse guilt against the guest of his Marshal, kept the matter untold and undiscovered, under the plea that he desired not to destroy the harmony of the general rejoicing.  The one or two field-officers with whom he took counsel agreed to the wisdom of letting the night pass away undisturbed.  The