have sketched as Ishmael. What his future might have been rose before
his thoughts; what it must be rose also, bitterly, blackly, drearily in
contrast. A noble without even a name; a chief of his race without
even the power to claim kinship with that race; owner by law of three
thousand broad English acres, yet an exile without freedom to set foot
on his native land; by heritage one among the aristocracy of England, by
circumstances, now and forever, till an Arab bullet should cut in twain
his thread of life, a soldier of the African legions, bound to obey the
commonest and coarsest boor that had risen to a rank above him: this was
what he knew himself to be, and knew that he must continue to be without
one appeal against it, without once stretching out his hand toward his
right of birth and station.

There was a passionate revolt, a bitter heart-sickness on him; all the
old freedom and peace and luxury and pleasure of the life he had left so
long allured him with a terrible temptation; the honors of the rank that
he should now have filled were not what he remembered. What he longed
for with an agonized desire was to stand once more stainless among his
equals; to reach once more the liberty of unchallenged, unfettered life;
to return once more to those who held him but as a dishonored memory,
as one whom violent death had well snatched from the shame of a criminal
career.

"But who would believe me now?" he thought. "Besides, this makes no
difference. If three words spoken would reinstate me, I could not
speak them at that cost. The beginning perhaps was folly, but for sheer
justice sake there is no drawing back now. Let him enjoy it; God knows I
do not grudge him it."

Yet, though it was true to the very core that no envy and no evil lay in
his heart against the younger brother to whose lot had fallen all good
gifts of men and fate, there was almost unbearable anguish on him in
this hour in which he learned the inheritance that had come to him, and
remembered that he could never take again even so much of it as lay in
the name of his fathers. When he had given his memory up to slander and
oblivion, and the shadow of a great shame; when he had let his life die
out from the world that had known him, and buried it beneath the rough,
weather-stained, blood-soaked cloth of a private soldier's uniform, he
had not counted the cost then, nor foreseen the cost hereafter. It had
fallen on him very heavily now.

Where he sto