Her eyes were fixed with a fearful intensity of appeal upon the stern face bent over her; her last arrow was sped; if this failed, all was over.  As he heard, he was visibly moved; he remembered the felon’s shame that in years gone by had fallen across the banished name of Bertie Cecil; the history seemed clear as crystal to him, seen beneath the light shed on it from other days.

His hand fell heavily on the gun-carriage.

“Mort de Dieu! it was his brother’s sin, not his!”

There was a long silence; those present, who knew nothing of all that was in his memory, felt instinctively that some dead weight of alien guilt was lifted off a blameless life forever.

She drew a deep, long, sighing breath; she knew that he was safe.  Her hands unconsciously locked on the great chief’s arms; her eyes looked up, senselessly in their rapture and their dread, to his.

“Quick, quick!” she gasped.  “The hours go so fast; while we speak here he——­”

The words died in her throat.  The Marshal swung around with a rapid sign to a staff officer.

“Pens and ink!  Instantly!  My brave child, what can we say to you?  I will send an aid to arrest the execution of the sentence.  It must be deferred till we know the whole truth of this.  If it be as it looks now, he shall be saved if the Empire can save him!”

She looked up in his eyes with a look that froze his very heart.

“His honor!” she muttered; “his honor—­if not his life!”

He understood her; he bowed his haughty head low down to hers.

“True.  We will cleanse that, if all other justice be too late.”

The answer was infinitely gentle, infinitely solemn.  Then he turned and wrote his hurried order, and bade his aid go with it without a second’s loss.  But Cigarette caught it from his hand.

“To me! to me!  No other will go so fast!”

“But, my child, you are worn out already.”

She turned on him her beautiful, wild eyes, in which the blinding, passionate tears were floating.

“Do you think I would tarry for that?  Ah!  I wish that I had let them tell me of God, that I might ask Him now to bless you!  Quick, quick!  Lend me your swiftest horse!  One that will not tire.  And send a second order by your aid-de-camp; the Arabs may kill me as I go, and then, they will not know!”

He stooped and touched her little, brown, scorched, feverish hand with reverence.

“My child, Africa has shown me much heroism, but none like yours.  If you fall, he shall be safe, and France will know how to avenge its darling’s loss.”

She turned and gave him one look, infinitely sweet, infinitely eloquent.

“Ah, France!” she said, so softly that the last word was but a sign of unutterable tenderness.  The old, imperishable early love was not dethroned; it was there, still before all else.  France was without rival with her.