e man who had carried his
secret so silently and so long, without one to know his burden or to
soothe his pain.

"Yes," she said thoughtfully, while over the brilliancy of her face
there passed a shadow. "There must be infinite nobility among these men,
who live without hope--live only to die. That soldier, a day or two
ago, who brought his dead comrade through the hurricane, risking his own
death rather than leave the body to the carrion-birds--you have heard of
him? What tenderness, what greatness there must have been in that poor
fellow's heart!"

"Oh, no! That was nothing."

"Nothing! They have told me he came every inch of the way in danger of
the Arabs' shot and steel. He had suffered so much to bring the body
safe across the plains, he fell down insensible on his entrance here."

"You set too much store on it. I owed him a debt far greater than any
act like that could ever repay."

"You! Was it you?"

"Yes, madame. He who perished had a thousandfold more of such nobility
as you have praised than I."

"Ah! Tell me of him," she said simply; but he saw that the lustrous eyes
bent on him had a grave, sweet sadness in them that was more precious
and more pitiful than a million utterances of regret could ever have
been.

Those belied her much who said that she was heartless; though grief had
never touched her, she could feel keenly the grief of other lives. He
obeyed her bidding now, and told her, in brief words, the story, which
had a profound pathos spoken there, where without, through the oval,
unglazed casement in the distance, there was seen the tall, dark,
leaning pine that overhung the grave of yesternight--the story over
which his voice oftentimes fell with the hush of a cruel pain in it, and
which he could have related to no other save herself. It had an intense
melancholy and a strange beauty in its brevity and its simplicity, told
in that gaunt, still, darkened chamber of the caravanserai, with
the gray gloom of its stone walls around, and the rays of the golden
sunlight from without straying in to touch the glistening hair of the
proud head that bent forward to listen to the recital. Her face grew
paler as she heard, and a mist was over the radiance of her azure eyes;
that death in the loneliness of the plains moved her deeply with the
grand simplicity of its unconscious heroism. And, though he spoke little
of himself, she felt, with all the divination of a woman's sympathies,
how he who told her