.

"Dieu! how cold you are! He is gone."

He could not answer her to thank her, but he crushed in his the little,
warm, brown palm. She felt a shiver shake his limbs.

"Is he your enemy?" she asked.

"No."

"What, then?"

"The man I love best on earth."

"Ah!" She had felt a surprise she had not spoke that he should flee thus
from any foe. "He thinks you dead, then?"

"Yes."

"And must always think so?"

"Yes." He held her hand still, and his own wrung it hard--the grasp of
comrade to comrade, not of man to woman. "Child, you are bold, generous,
pitiful; for God's sake, get me sent out of this camp to-night. I am
powerless."

There was that in the accent which struck his listener to the heart. He
was powerless, fettered hand and foot as though he were a prisoner;
a night's absence, and he would be shot as a deserter. He had grown
accustomed to this rendering up of all his life to the rules of others;
but now and then the galled spirit chafed, the netted stag strained at
the bonds.

"I will try," said Cigarette simply, without any of her audacity or of
her vanity in the answer. "Go you to the fire; you are cold."

"Are you sure he will not return?"

"Not he. They are gone to eat and drink; I go with them. What is it you
fear?"

"My own weakness."

She was silent. She could just watch his features by the dim light, and
she saw his mouth quiver under the fullness of his beard. He felt that
if he looked again on the face of the man he loved he might be broken
into self-pity, and unloose his silence, and shatter all the work of
so many years. He had been strong where men of harder fiber and less
ductile temper might have been feeble; but he never thought that he had
been so; he only thought that he had acted on impulse, and had remained
true to his act through the mere instinct of honor--an instinct inborn
in his blood and his Order--an instinct natural and unconscious with him
as the instinct by which he drove his breath.

"You are a fine soldier," said Cigarette musingly; "such men are not
weak."

"Why? We are only strong as tigers are strong--just the strength of the
talon and fang. I do not know. I was weak as water once; I may be again,
if--if----"

He scarcely knew that he was speaking aloud; he had forgotten her! His
whole heart seemed burned as with fire by the memory of that one face
so familiar, so well loved, yet from which he must shrink as though some
cowardly sin were between them. T