im; but the lithe fingers only wound
themselves closer on his arm.

"Be still--fool!" she muttered; and there was that in the accent that
lent a strange force and dignity in that moment to the careless and
mischievous plaything of the soldiery--force that overcame him, dignity
that overawed him. "You are of his people; you have his eyes, and his
look, and his features. He disowns you, or you him. No matter which.
He is of your blood; and he lies under sentence of death. Do you know
that?"

With a stifled cry, the other recoiled from her; he never doubted that
she spoke the truth; nor could any who had looked upon her face.

"Do not lie to me," she said curtly. "It avails you nothing. Read that."

She thrust before him the paper the pigeon had brought; his hand
trembled sorely as he held it; he believed in that moment that
this strange creature--half soldier, half woman, half brigand, half
child--knew all his story and all his shame from his brother.

"Shot!" he echoed hoarsely, as she had done, when he had read on to the
end. "Shot! Oh, my God! and I----"

She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess within the
bazaar, he submitting unresistingly. He was filled with the horror, the
remorse, the overwhelming shock of his brother's doom.

"He will be shot," she said with a strange calmness. "We shoot down many
men in our army. I knew him well. He was justified in his act, I do not
doubt; but discipline will not stay for that--"

"Silence, for mercy's sake! Is there no hope--no possibility?"

Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry, hard words came
through them. "None. His chief could have cut him down in the instant.
It took place in camp. You feel this thing; you are of his race, then?"

"I am his brother!"

She was silent; looking at him fixedly, it did not seem to her strange
that she should thus have met one of his blood in the crowds of Algiers.
She was absorbed in the one catastrophe whose hideousness seemed to eat
her very life away, even while her nerve, and her brain, and her courage
remained at their keenest and strongest.

"You are his brother," she said slowly, so much as an affirmation that
his belief was confirmed that she had learned both their relationship
and their history from Cecil. "You must go to him, then."

He shook from head to foot.

"Yes, yes! But it will be too late!"

She did not know that the words were cried out in all the contrition of
an unavailing