world, but it had not corroded her; she
had acquired keen discernment from it, but she had preserved all the
courageous and the chivalrous instincts of her superb nature. She looked
at him now, and stretched her hands out toward him with a royal and
gracious gesture of infinite eloquence.

"You are guiltless, whatever circumstance may have arrayed against you,
whatever shadow of evil may have fallen falsely on you. Is it not so?"

He bowed his head low over her hands as he took them. In that moment
half the bitterness of his doom passed from him; he had at least her
faith. But his face was bloodless as that of a corpse, and the loud
beatings of his heart were audible on the stillness. This faith must
live on without one thing to show that he deserved it; if, in time to
come, it should waver and fall, and leave him in the darkness of the
foul suspicion under which he dwelt, what wonder would there be?

He lifted his head and looked her full in the eyes; her own closed
involuntarily, and filled with tears. She felt that the despair and the
patience of that look would haunt her until her dying day.

"I was guiltless; but none could credit it then; none would do so now;
nor can I seek to make them. Ask me no more; give me your belief, if you
can--God knows what precious mercy it is to me; but leave me to fulfill
my fate, and tell no living creature what I have told you now."

The great tears stood in her eyes, and blinded her as she heard. Even in
the amaze and the vagueness of this first knowledge of the cause of his
exile she felt instinctively, as the Little One also had done, that some
great sacrifice, some great fortitude and generosity, lay within this
sealed secret of his sufferance of wrong. She knew, too, that it would
be useless to seek to learn that which he had chosen to conceal; that
for no slender cause could he have come out to lead this life of whose
sufferings she could gauge the measure; that nothing save some absolute
and imperative reason could have driven him to accept such living death
as was his doom in Africa.

"Tell no one!" she echoed. "What! not Philip even? Not your oldest
friend. Ah! be sure, whatever the evidence might be against you, his
heart never condemned you for one instant."

"I believe it. Yet all you can do for me, all I implore you to do for
me, is to keep silence forever on my name. To-day, accident has made me
break a vow I never thought but to keep sacred. When you recognize