ortion, this feebleness and fear roused
his wondering compassion almost as a woman's weakness would have done.
Still he never answered. The hatred of the stain that had been brought
upon their name by his brother's deed (stain none the less dark, in his
sight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from this man, who
was the only creature of their race who ever had turned poltroon,
the thousand remembrances of childhood that uprose before him, the
irresistible yearning for some word from the other's lips that should
tell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough to
kill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril--all
these kept him silent.

His brother misinterpreted that silence.

"I am in your power--utterly in your power," he moaned in his fear. "I
stand in your place; I bear your title; you know that our father and our
brother are dead? All I have inherited is yours. Do you know that, since
you have never claimed it?"

"I know it."

"And you have never come forward to take your rights?"

"What I did not do to clear my own honor, I was not likely to do merely
to hold a title."

The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which his words
fell; it was too high to be comprehended by the lower nature. The man
who lived in prosperity and peace, and in the smile of the world, and
the purple of power, looked bewildered at the man who led the simple,
necessitous, perilous, semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Franco
soldier.

"But--great Heaven!--this life of yours? It must be wretchedness?"

"Perhaps. It has at least no disgrace in it."

The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had suffered
himself to show. It stung down to his listener's soul.

"No--no!" he murmured. "You are happier than I. You have no remorse to
bear! And yet--to tell the world that I am guilty----"

"You need never tell it; I shall not."

He spoke quite quietly, quite patiently. Yet he well knew, and had well
weighed, all he surrendered in that promise--the promise to condemn
himself to a barren and hopeless fate forever.

"You will not?"

The question died almost inaudible on his dry, parched tongue. The
one passion of fear upon him was for himself; even in that moment of
supplication his disordered thoughts hovered wildly over the chances
of whether, if his elder brother even now asserted his innocence and
claimed his birthright, the world and its judges would ever belie