ooded the land in the full morning. There were movement, noise,
changes, haste in the entrance. Besides the arrival of the detachment
of the line and a string of northward-bound camels, the retinue of some
travelers of rank was preparing for departure, and the resources of the
humble caravanserai were taxed beyond their powers. The name that some
of the hurrying grooms shouted loudly in their impatience broke through
his stupor and reached him. It was that of the woman whom, however
madly, he loved with all the strength of a passion born out of utter
hopelessness. He turned to the outrider nearest him:

"You are of the Princesse Corona's suite? What does she do here?"

"Madame travels to see the country and the war."

"The war? This is no place for her. The land is alive with danger--rife
with death."

"Milady travels with M. le Duc, her brother. Milady does not know what
fear is."

"But----"

The remonstrance died on his lips; he stood gazing out from the gloom
of the arch at a face close to him, on which the sun shone full, a face
unseen for twelve long years, and which, a moment before laughing and
careless in the light, changed and grew set, and rigid, and pale with
the pallor of an unutterable horror. His own flushed, and moved, and
altered with a wholly different emotion--emotion that was, above all, of
an intense and yearning tenderness. For a moment both stood motionless
and speechless; then, with a marvelous self-command and self-restraint,
Cecil brought his hand to his brow in military salute, passed with the
impassiveness of a soldier who passed a gentleman, reached his charger,
and rode away upon his errand over the brown and level ground.

He had known his brother in that fleeting glance, but he hoped that
his brother would see no more in him than a French trooper who bore
resemblance by a strange hazard to one long believed to be dead and
gone. The instinct of generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, moved
him now as, long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sin
of his mother's darling as his own.

Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, never came to
him as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay between
him and his goal. His one impulse had been to spare the other from the
knowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness and
the bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier's
grave.

Within six-and-thirty ho