it had been brought to him in a tender compassion, and he did
keep it; kept it through dark days and wild nights, through the scorch
of the desert and the shadows of death, till the young eyes that
questioned him now with such innocent wonder had gained the grander
luster of their womanhood and had brought him a grief wider than he knew
now.

At that moment, as the child stood beside him under the drooping acacia
boughs, with the green, sloping lower valley seen at glimpses through
the wall of leaves, one of the men of the Stephanien approached him
with an English letter, which, as it was marked "instant," they had laid
apart from the rest of the visitors' pile of correspondence. Cecil took
it wearily--nothing but fresh embarrassments could come to him from
England--and looked at the little Lady Venetia.

"Will you allow me?"

She bowed her graceful head; with all the naif unconsciousness of a
child, she had all the manner of the veille cour; together they made her
enchanting.

He broke the envelope and read--a blurred, scrawled, miserable letter;
the words erased with passionate strokes, and blotted with hot tears,
and scored out in impulsive misery. It was long, yet at a glance he
scanned its message and its meaning; at the first few words he knew its
whole as well as though he had studied every line.

A strong tremor shook him from head to foot, a tremor at once of
passionate rage and of as passionate pain; his face blanched to a deadly
whiteness; his teeth clinched as though he were restraining some bodily
suffering, and he tore the letter in two and stamped it down into the
turf under his heel with a gesture as unlike his common serenity of
manner as the fiery passion that darkened in his eyes was unlike the
habitual softness of his too pliant and too unresentful temper. He
crushed the senseless paper again and again down into the grass beneath
his heel; his lips shook under the silky abundance of his beard; the
natural habit of long usage kept him from all utterance, and even in the
violence of its shock he remembered the young Venetia's presence; but,
in that one fierce, unrestrained gesture the shame and suffering upon
him broke out, despite himself.

The child watched him, startled and awed. She touched his hand softly.

"What is it? Is it anything worse?"

He turned his eyes on her with a dry, hot, weary anguish in them; he was
scarcely conscious what he said or what he answered.

"Worse--worse?" h