rmy."

That was all which he answered, and neither his counsel nor his accusers
could extort another syllable from him.

He knew that what he had done was justified to his own conscience, but
he did not seek to dispute that it was unjustifiable in military law.
True, had all been told, it was possible enough that his judges would
exonerate him morally, even if they condemned him legally; his act
would be seen blameless as a man's, even while still punishable as a
soldier's; but to purchase immunity for himself at the cost of bringing
the fairness of her fame into the coarse babble of men's tongues was an
alternative, craven and shameful, which never even once glanced across
his thoughts.

He had kept faith to a woman whom he had known heartless and well-nigh
worthless; it was not to the woman whom he loved with all the might of
an intense passion, and whom he knew pure and glorious as the morning
sun, that he would break his faith now.

All through the three days that the council sat his look and his manner
never changed--the first was quite calm, though very weary; the latter
courteous, but resolute, with the unchanged firmness of one who knew his
own past action justified. For the rest, many noticed that, during the
chief of the long, exhausting hours of his examination and his trial,
his thoughts seemed far away, and he appeared to recall them to the
present with difficulty, and with nothing of the vivid suspense of an
accused, whose life and death swung in the judgment-balance.

In truth, he had no dread as he had no hope left; he knew well enough
that by the blow which had vindicated her honor he had forfeited his own
existence. All he wished was that his sentence had been dealt without
this formula of debate and of delay, which could have issue but in one
end. There was not one man in court who was not more moved than he, more
quick to terror and regret for his doom. To many among his comrades
who had learned to love the gentle, silent "aristocrat," who bore every
hardship so patiently, and humanized them so imperceptibly by the simple
force of an unvaunted example, those three days were torture. Wild,
brutal brigands, whose year was one long razzia of plunder, rapine, and
slaughter, felt their lips tremble like young girls' when they asked how
the issue went for him; and the blood-stained marauders, who thought as
little of assassination for a hidden pot of gold as butchers of drawing
a knife across a sheep'