He had kept faith to a woman whom he had known heartless and well-nigh worthless; it was not to the woman whom he loved with all the might of an intense passion, and whom he knew pure and glorious as the morning sun, that he would break his faith now.

All through the three days that the council sat his look and his manner never changed—­the first was quite calm, though very weary; the latter courteous, but resolute, with the unchanged firmness of one who knew his own past action justified.  For the rest, many noticed that, during the chief of the long, exhausting hours of his examination and his trial, his thoughts seemed far away, and he appeared to recall them to the present with difficulty, and with nothing of the vivid suspense of an accused, whose life and death swung in the judgment-balance.

In truth, he had no dread as he had no hope left; he knew well enough that by the blow which had vindicated her honor he had forfeited his own existence.  All he wished was that his sentence had been dealt without this formula of debate and of delay, which could have issue but in one end.  There was not one man in court who was not more moved than he, more quick to terror and regret for his doom.  To many among his comrades who had learned to love the gentle, silent “aristocrat,” who bore every hardship so patiently, and humanized them so imperceptibly by the simple force of an unvaunted example, those three days were torture.  Wild, brutal brigands, whose year was one long razzia of plunder, rapine, and slaughter, felt their lips tremble like young girls’ when they asked how the issue went for him; and the blood-stained marauders, who thought as little of assassination for a hidden pot of gold as butchers of drawing a knife across a sheep’s throat, grew still and fear-stricken with a great awe when the muttering passed through the camp that they would see no more among their ranks that “woman’s face” which they had beheld so often foremost in the fight, with a look on it that thrilled their hearts like their forbidden chant of the Marseillaise.  For when the third day closed, they knew that he must die.

There were men, hard as steel, ravenous of blood as vultures, who, when they heard that sentence given, choked great, deep sobs down into the cavernous depths of their broad, seared, sinewy breasts; but he never gave sigh or sign.  He never moved once while the decree of death was read to him; and there was no change in the weary calmness of his eyes.  He bent his head in acquiescence.

“C’est bien!” he said simply.

It seemed well to him.  Dead, his secret would lie in the grave with him, and the long martyrdom of his life be ended.

In the brightness of the noon Cigarette leaned out of her little oval casement that framed her head like an old black oak carving—­a head with the mellow bloom on its cheeks, and the flash of scarlet above its dark curls, and the robin-like grace of poise and balance as it hung out there in the sun.