“He is the head of my house!” he answered her, scarce knowing what he answered.  “He should bear the title that I bear now.  He is here, in this misery, because he is the most merciful, the most generous, the most long-suffering of living souls!  If he dies, it is not they who have killed him; it is I!”

She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute command which never varied; she neglected all that wonder, or curiosity, or interest would have made her as at any other time, she only heeded the few great facts that bore upon the fate of the condemned.

“Settle with yourself for that sin,” she said bitterly.  “Your remorse will not save him.  But do the thing that I bid you, if that remorse be sincere.  Write me out here that title you say he should bear, and your statement that he is your brother, and should be the chief of your house; then sign it, and give it to me.”

He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into her face.

“Who are you?  What are you?  If you have the power to do it, for the love of God rescue him!  It is I who have murdered him—­I—­who have let him live on in this hell for my sake!”

“For your sake!”

She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the face; that glance of the speechless scorn, the unutterable rebuke of the woman-child who would herself have died a thousand deaths rather than have purchased a whole existence by a single falsehood or a single cowardice, smote him like a blow, and avenged his sin more absolutely than any public chastisement.  The courage and the truth of a girl scorned his timorous fear and his living lie.  His head sank, he seemed to shrink under her gaze; his act had never looked so vile to him as it looked now.

She gazed a moment longer at him with her mute and wondering disdain that there should be on earth a male life capable of such fear and of such ignominy as this.  Then the strong and rapid power in her took its instant ascendancy over the weaker nature.

“Monsieur, I do not know your story, I do not want.  I am not used to men who let others suffer for them.  What I want is your written statement of your brother’s name and station; give it me.”

He made a gesture of consent; he would have signed away his soul, if he could, in the stupor of remorse which had seized him.  She brought him pens and paper from the Turk’s store, and dictated what he wrote: 

“I hereby affirm that the person serving in the Chasseurs d’Afrique under the name of Louis Victor is my older brother, Bertie Cecil, lawfully, by inheritance, the Viscount Royallieu, Peer of England.  I hereby also acknowledge that I have succeeded to and borne the title illegally, under the supposition of his death.

“Berkeley Cecil.” (Signed)

He wrote it mechanically; the force of her will and the torture of his own conscience driving him, on an impulse, to undo in an instant the whole web of falsehood that he had let circumstance weave on and on to shelter him through twelve long years.  He let her draw the paper from him and fold it away in her belt.  He watched her with a curious, dreamy sense of his own impotence against the fierce and fiery torrent of her bidding.