spur of generous affection, and actuated by the
strange hazard that made the keeping of a woman's secret demand the same
reticence which also saved the young lad's name; to draw back from it
now would have been a cowardice impossible to his nature.

All seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one another. He
could not speak with tenderness to this craven who had been false to
the fair repute of their name--and he would not speak with harshness. He
felt too sick at heart, too weary, too filled with pain, to ask aught
of his brother's life. It had been saved from temptation, and therefore
saved from evil; that knowledge sufficed to him.

The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened. In the many years
that had passed by, although his character had not changed, his position
had altered greatly; and in the last few months he had enjoyed all the
power that wealth and independence and the accession to his title could
bestow. He felt some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to him
by the fact that the rightful heir of them still lived; some chafing,
ingrate, and unreasoning impatience with the savior of his whole
existence; some bitter pangs of conscience that he would be baser yet,
base beyond all baseness, to remain in his elder's place, and accept
this sacrifice still, while knowing now the truth.

"Bertie--Bertie!" he stammered, in hurried appeal--and the name of his
youth touched the hearer of it strangely, making him for the moment
forget all save that he looked once more upon one of his own race--"on
my soul, I never doubted that the story of your death was true. No one
did. All the world believed it. If I had known you lived, I would have
said that you were innocent; I would--I would have told them how I
forged your friend's name and your own when I was so desperate that
I scarce knew what I did. But they said that you were killed, and I
thought then--then--it was not worth while; it would have broken my
father's heart. God help me! I was a coward!"

He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one. Herein lay
the whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, and his ingratitude.
Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist where craven selfishness
holds reign; yet there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn that
moved him. After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroic
endurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he had
learned to take as his daily p