voluntarily remain a soldier here? Lord
Royallieu must yield them in the instant you prove your identity, and in
that there could be no difficulty. I remember you well now, and Philip,
I am certain, will only need to see you once to--"

"Hush, for pity's sake! Have you never heard--have none ever told
you----"

"What?"

Her face grew paler with a vague sense of fear; she knew that he had
been equable and resolute under the severest tests that could try the
strength and the patience of man, and she knew, therefore, that no
slender thing could agitate and could unman him thus.

"What is it I should have heard?" she asked him, as he kept his silence.

He turned from her so that she could not see his face.

"That, when I became dead to the world, I died with the taint of crime
on me!"

"Of crime?"

An intense horror thrilled through the echo of the word; but she rose,
and moved, and faced him with the fearless resolve of a woman whom no
half-truth would blind, and no shadowy terror appall.

"Of crime? What crime?"

Then, and then only, he looked at her, a strange, fixed, hopeless, yet
serene look, that she knew no criminal ever would or could have given.

"I was accused of having forged your brother's name."

A faint cry escaped her; her lips grew white, and her eyes darkened and
dilated.

"Accused. But wrongfully?"

His breath came and went in quick, sharp spasms.

"I could not prove that."

"Not prove it? Why?"

"I could not."

"But he--Philip--never believed you guilty?"

"I cannot tell. He may; he must."

"But you are not!"

It was not an interrogation, but an affirmation that rang out in the
silver clearness of her voice. There was not a single intonation of
doubt in it; there was rather a haughty authority that forbade even
himself to say that one of his race and that one of his Order could have
been capable of such ignoble and craven sin.

His mouth quivered, a bitter sigh broke from him; he turned his eyes on
her with a look that pierced her to the heart.

"Think me guilty or guiltless, as you will; I cannot answer you."

His last words were suffocated with the supreme anguish of their
utterance. As she heard it, the generosity, the faith, the inherent
justice, and the intrinsic sweetness that were latent in her beneath
the negligence and the chillness of external semblance rose at once to
reject the baser, to accept the nobler, belief offered to her choice.
She had lived much in the