st her.

It was broken asunder at last--all the long and bitter patience, all
the calm and resolute endurance, all the undeviating serenity beneath
provocation, which had never yielded through twelve long years,
but which had borne with infamy and with tyranny with such absolute
submission for sake of those around him, who would revolt at his sign
and be slaughtered for his cause. The promise he had given to endure all
things for their sakes--the sakes of his soldiery, of his comrades--was
at last forgotten. All he remembered was the vileness that dared touch
her name, the shame that through him was breathed on her. Rank, duty,
bondage, consequence, all were forgotten in that one instant of insult
that mocked in its odious lie at her purity. He was no longer the
soldier bound in obedience to submit to the indignities that his chief
chose to heap on him; he was a gentleman who defended a woman's honor, a
man who avenged a slur on the life that he loved.

Chateauroy wrenched his wrist out of the hold that crushed it, and drew
his pistol. Cecil knew that the laws of active service would hold him
but justly dealt with if the shot laid him dead in that instant for his
act and his words.

"You can kill me--I know it. Well, use your prerogative; it will be the
sole good you have ever done to me."

And he stood erect, patient, motionless, looking into his chief's eyes
with a calm disdain, with an unuttered challenge that, for the first
moment, wrung something of savage respect and of sullen admiration out
from the soul of his great foe.

He did not fire; it was the only time in which any trait of abstinence
from cruelty had been ever seen in him. He signed to the soldiers of
the guard with one hand, while with the other he still covered with
his pistol the man whom martial law would have allowed him to have shot
down, or have cut down, at his horse's feet.

"Arrest him," he said simply.

Cecil offered no resistance; he let them seize and disarm him without an
effort at the opposition which could have been but a futile, unavailing
trial of brute force. He dreaded lest there should be one sound that
should reach her in that tent where the triad of standards drooped in
the dusky distance. He had been, moreover, too long beneath the yoke of
that despotic and irresponsible authority to waste breath or to waste
dignity in vain contest with the absolute and the immutable. He was
content with what he had done--content to have m