s all
I could do to keep him from follerin' of you this morning; he sawed my
arms off almost."

With which, Rake, conscious that he had been guilty of unpardonable
disobedience and outrageous interference, hung his head over the gun; a
little anxious and a good deal ashamed.

Cecil smiled a little, despite himself.

"Rake, you will do for no service, I am afraid; you are terribly
insubordinate!"

He had not the heart to say more; the man's fidelity was too true to be
returned with rebuke; and stronger than all surprise and annoyance was a
strange mingling of pain and pleasure in him to think that the horse he
loved so well was still so near him, the comrade of his adversity as he
had been the companion of his happiest hours.

"These things will keep him a few days," he thought, as he looked at his
hunting-watch, and the priceless pearl in each of his wristband-studs.
HE would have pawned every atom he had about him to have had the King
with him a week longer.

The night fell, the stars came out, the storm-rack of a coming tempest
drifted over the sky, the train rushed onward through the thickening
darkness, through the spectral country--it was like his life, rushing
headlong down into impenetrable gloom. The best, the uttermost, that he
could look for was a soldier's grave, far away under some foreign soil.

A few evenings later the Countess Guenevere stood alone in her own
boudoir in her Baden suite; she was going to dine with an Archduchess of
Russia, and the splendid jewels of her House glittered through the black
shower of her laces, and crowned her beautiful glossy hair, her delicate
imperial head. In her hands was a letter--oddly written in pencil on a
leaf torn out of a betting book, but without a tremor or a change in
the writing itself. And as she stood a shiver shook her frame; in the
solitude of her lighted and luxurious chamber her cheek grew pale, her
eyes grew dim.

"To refute the charge," ran the last words of what was at best but a
fragment, "I must have broken my promise to you, and have compromised
your name. Keeping silence myself, but letting the trial take place,
law-inquiries so execrable and so minute, would soon have traced through
others that I was with you that evening. To clear myself I must have
attainted your name with public slander, and drawn the horrible ordeal
on you before the world. Let me be thought guilty. It matters little.
Henceforth I shall be dead to all who know me