their welcome supper, and sat down near them; rejecting,
with a gesture, the most savory portion which, with their customary love
and care for him, they were careful to select and bring to him. There
had never been a time when they had found him fail to prefer them to
himself, or fail to do them kindly service, if of such he had a chance;
and they returned it with all that rough and silent attachment that can
be so strong and so stanch in lives that may be black with crime or red
with slaughter.

He sat like a man in a dream, while the loosened tongues of the men ran
noisily on a hundred themes as they chaffed each other, exchanged a fire
of bivouac jokes more racy than decorous, and gave themselves to the
enjoyment of their rude meal, that had to them that savor which long
hunger alone can give. Their voices came dull on his ear; the ruddy
warmth of the fire was obscured to his sight; the din, the laughter, the
stir all over the great camp, at the hour of dinner were lost on him.
He was insensible to everything except the innumerable memories that
thronged upon him, and the aching longing that filled his heart with the
sight of the friend of his youth.

"He said once that he would take my hand before all the world always,
come what would," he thought. "Would he take it now, I wonder? Yes; he
never believed against me."

And, as he thought, the same anguish of desire that had before smitten
him to stand once more guiltless in the presence of men, and once more
bear, untarnished, the name of his race and the honor of his fathers,
shook him now as strong winds shake a tree that yet is fast rooted at
its base, though it sway a while beneath the storm.

"How weak I am!" he thought bitterly. "What does it matter? Life is so
short, one is a coward indeed to fret over it. I cannot undo what I did.
I cannot, if I could. To betray him now! God! not for a kingdom, if I
had the chance! Besides, she may live still; and, even were she dead,
to tarnish her name to clear my own would be a scoundrel's
baseness--baseness that would fail as it merited; for who could be
brought to believe me now?"

The thoughts unformed drifted through his mind, half dulled, half
sharpened by the deadly pain, and the rush of old brotherly love that
had arisen in him as he had seen the face of his friend beside the
watch-fire of the French bivouac. It was hard; it was cruelly hard; he
had, after a long and severe conflict, brought himself into conten