ent importance, when
coolly weighed and passed upon, to make her anxious or afraid.

In a sick and travel-worn slave she had recognized one to whom, in her
younger days, she had plighted her faith, and who had, in turn, given
his faith to her. He was now a captive, and she had become one of the
nobles of the empire. But his evil lot had not been of her procuring,
being merely one of those ill fortunes which are cast broadly over the
earth, and whose descent upon any one person more than upon another can
be attributed to destiny alone. Nor, in accepting her high position, had
she been guilty of breach of faith, for she had long awaited the return
of her lover, and he had not come. And through all those years, as she
had grown into more mature womanhood, she had vaguely felt that those
stolen interviews had been but the unreasoning suggestions of girlish
romance, too carelessly indifferent to the exigencies of poverty and
diverse nationality; and that, if he had ever returned to claim her,
mutual explanation and forgetfulness could have been their only proper
course. There was, therefore, nothing for which she could reproach
herself, or for which he could justly blame her, were he to recognize
her as the wife of another man.

But there was little chance, indeed, that such a recognition could take
place. Certainly, now that, apart from her troubled and excited fears of
the previous day, she more deliberately weighed the chances, she felt
assured that in her rapid passage through the evening gloom, nothing
could have betrayed her. And it was not probable that even in open
daylight and in face-to-face encounter with him he would be likely to
know her. She had recognized him almost at a glance, for not only was
his dress composed of the same poor and scant material which had served
him years before, but even in form and feature he seemed unchanged, his
slight frame having gained no expansion as his manhood had progressed,
while his face retained in every line the same soft and almost girlish
expression. But with herself all things had altered. It was not merely
that the poorly clad maiden who, with naked feet, well-tanned hands, and
tangled and loosely hanging curls, had been wont to wander carelessly by
the shore of a distant bay, had become a richly adorned matron of the
imperial centre. Beyond all that, there was a greater change, which,
though in its gradual progress almost inappreciable to one who had
watched her day by