to and fro the narrow floor whose
rugged earth had been covered with furs and rugs lest it should strike
a chill to her as she passed over it; the torture grew unsupportable to
him. And yet, it had so much of sweetness that he was powerless to end
it--sweetness in the knowledge that she knew him now her equal, at least
by birth; in the change that it had made in her voice and her glance,
while the first grew tender with olden memories, and the last had the
smile of friendship; in the closeness of the remembrances that seemed to
draw and bind them together; in the swift sense that in an instant, by
the utterance of a name, the ex-barrier of caste which had been between
them had fallen now and forever.

She watched him with grave, musing eyes. She was moved, startled,
softened to a profound pity for him, and filled with a wondering of
regret; yet a strong emotion of relief, of pleasure, rose above these.
She had never forgotten the man to whom, in her childish innocence, she
had brought the gifts of her golden store; she was glad that he lived,
though he lived thus, glad with a quicker, warmer, more vivid emotion
than any that had ever occupied her for any man living or dead except
her brother. The interest she had vaguely felt in a stranger's fortunes,
and which she had driven contemptuously away as unworthy of her
harboring, was justified for one whom her people had known and valued
while she had been in her infancy, and of whom she had never heard
from her brother's lips aught except constant regret and imperishable
attachment. For it was true, as Cecil divined, that the dark cloud under
which his memory had passed to all in England had never been seen by her
eyes, from which, in childhood, it had been screened, and, in womanhood,
withheld, because his name had been absolutely forgotten by all save the
Seraph, to whom it had been fraught with too much pain for its utterance
to be ever voluntary.

"What is it you fear from Philip?" she asked him, at last, when she had
waited vainly for him to break the silence. "You can remember him but
ill if you think that there will be anything in his heart save joy when
he shall know that you are living. You little dream how dear your memory
is to him--"

He paused before her abruptly.

"Hush, hush! or you will kill me! Why!--three nights ago I fled the
camp as men flee pestilence, because I saw his face in the light of the
bivouac-fire and dreaded that he should so see mine!"