over the shadowy country,
of seeking by bodily fatigue to kill the thoughts rising in him, of
drinking at a little water-channel in the rocks as thirstily as some
driven deer, of flinging himself down at length, worn out, to sleep
under the hanging brow of a mighty wall of rock; of waking, when the
dawn was reddening the east, with the brown plains around him, and far
away, under a knot of palms was a goatherd with his flock, like an idyl
from the old pastoral life of Syria. He stood looking at the light which
heralded the sun, with some indefinite sense of heavy loss, of fresh
calamity, upon him. It was only slowly that he remembered all. Years
seemed to have been pressed into the three nights and days since he
had sat by the bivouac-fire, listening to the fiery words of the little
Friend of the Flag.

The full consciousness of all that he had surrendered in yielding up
afresh his heritage rolled in on his memory, like the wave of some heavy
sea that sweeps down all before it.

When that tear-blotted and miserable letter had reached him in the green
alleys of the Stephanien, and confessed to him that his brother had
relied on the personal likeness between them and the similarity of their
handwriting to pass off as his the bill in which his own name and
that of his friend was forged, no thought had crossed him to take upon
himself the lad's sin. It had only been when, brought under the charge,
he must, to clear himself, have at once accused the boy, and have
betrayed the woman whose reputation was in his keeping, that, rather by
generous impulse than by studied intention, he had taken up the burden
that he had now carried for so long. Whether or no the money-lenders
had been themselves in reality deceived, he could never tell; but it had
been certain that, having avowed themselves confident of his guilt, they
could never shift the charge on to his brother in the face of his own
acceptance of it. So he had saved the youth without premeditation or
reckoning of the cost. And now that the full cost was known to him, he
had not shrunk back from its payment. Yet that payment was one that
gave him a greater anguish than if he had laid down his life in physical
martyrdom.

To go back to the old luxury, and ease, and careless peace; to go back
to the old, fresh, fair English woodlands, to go back to the power of
command and the delight of free gifts, to go back to men's honor, and
reverence, and high esteem--these would have