remorse; she gave them only their literal significance,
and shuddered as she answered him.

"That you must risk. You must go to him. But, first, I must know more.
Tell me his name, his rank."

He was silent; coward and egotist though he was, both cowardice and
egotism were killed in him under the overwhelming horror with which
he felt himself as truly by moral guilt a fratricide as though he had
stabbed his elder through the heart.

"Speak!" hissed Cigarette through her clenched teeth. "If you have any
kindness, any pity, any love for the man of your blood, who will be shot
there like a dog, do not waste a second--answer me, tell me all."

He turned his wild, terrified glance upon her; he had in that moment no
sense but to seize some means of reparation, to declare his brother's
rights, to cry out to the very stones of the streets his own wrong and
his victim's sacrifice.

"He is the head of my house!" he answered her, scarce knowing what he
answered. "He should bear the title that I bear now. He is here, in this
misery, because he is the most merciful, the most generous, the most
long-suffering of living souls! If he dies, it is not they who have
killed him; it is I!"

She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute command
which never varied; she neglected all that wonder, or curiosity, or
interest would have made her as at any other time, she only heeded the
few great facts that bore upon the fate of the condemned.

"Settle with yourself for that sin," she said bitterly. "Your remorse
will not save him. But do the thing that I bid you, if that remorse be
sincere. Write me out here that title you say he should bear, and your
statement that he is your brother, and should be the chief of your
house; then sign it, and give it to me."

He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into her face.

"Who are you? What are you? If you have the power to do it, for the love
of God rescue him! It is I who have murdered him--I--who have let him
live on in this hell for my sake!"

"For your sake!"

She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the face; that glance
of the speechless scorn, the unutterable rebuke of the woman-child who
would herself have died a thousand deaths rather than have purchased a
whole existence by a single falsehood or a single cowardice, smote
him like a blow, and avenged his sin more absolutely than any public
chastisement. The courage and the truth of a girl scorn