vering;
his head was raised, and his carriage had a fearless dignity.

"No. I was innocent. But in honor I must bear the yoke that I took on
me long ago; in honor I can never give you or any living soul the proof
that this crime was not mine. I thought that I should go to my grave
without any ever hearing of the years that I have passed in Africa,
without any ever learning the name I used to bear. As it is, all I can
ask is now--to be forgotten."

His voice fell before the last words, and faltered over them. It was
bitter to ask only for oblivion from the woman whom he loved with all
the strength of a sudden passion born in utter hopelessness; the woman
whose smile, whose beauty, whose love might even possibly have been won
as his own in the future, if he could have claimed his birthright. So
bitter that, rather than have spoken those words of resignation, he
would have been led out by a platoon of his own soldiery and shot in the
autumn sunlight beside Rake's grave.

"You ask what will not be mine to give," she answered him, while a
great weariness stole through her own words, for she was bewildered, and
pained, and oppressed with a new, strange sense of helplessness before
this man's nameless suffering. "Remember--I knew you so well in my
earliest years, and you are so dear to the one dearest to me. It will
not be possible to forget such a meeting as this. Silence, of course,
you can command from me, if you insist on it; but--"

"I command nothing from you; but I implore it. It is the sole mercy
you can show. Never, for God's sake! speak of me to your brother or to
mine."

"Do you so mistrust Philip's affection?"

"No. It is because I trust it too entirely."

"Too entirely to do what?"

"To deal it fruitless pain. As you love him--as you pity me--pray that
he and I never meet!"

"But why? If all this could be cleared----"

"It never can be."

The baffled sense of impotence against the granite wall of some
immovable calamity which she had felt before came on her. She had been
always used to be obeyed, followed, and caressed; to see obstacles
crumble, difficulties disappear, before her wish; she had not been tried
by any sorrow, save when, a mere child still, she felt the pain of her
father's death; she had been lapped in softest luxury, crowned with
easiest victory. The sense that here there was a tragedy whose meaning
she could not reach, that there was here a fate that she could not
change or soften, b