his
past.

He sprang to this feet, and as he turned in the moonlight he saw once
more his brother's face, pale as the face of the dead, and strained with
an agonizing dread. Concealment was no longer possible. The younger
man knew that the elder lived; knew it by a strange and irresistible
certainty that needed no proof, that left no place for hope or fear in
its chill, leaden, merciless conviction.

For some moments neither spoke. A flood of innumerable memories choked
thought or word in both. They knew each other--all was said in that.

Cecil was the first to break the silence. He moved nearer with a rapid
movement, and his hand fell heavily on the other's shoulder.

"Have you lived stainlessly since?"

The question was stern as the demand of a judge. His brother shuddered
beneath this touch, and covered his face with his hands.

"God is my witness, yes! But you--you--they said that you were dead!"

Cecil's hand fell from his shoulder. There was that in the words which
smote him more cruelly than any Arab steel could have done; there was
the accent of regret.

"I am dead," he said simply; "dead to the world and you."

He who bore the title of Royallieu covered his face.

"How have you lived?" he whispered hoarsely.

"Honorably. Let that suffice. And you?"

The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal--the old, timorous,
terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the boy's face,
strangely returning on the gracious and mature beauty of the man.

"In honor too, I swear! That was my first disgrace, and my last. You
bore the weight of my shame? Good God, what can I say? Such nobility,
such sacrifice----"

He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy the one who had
lost all for his sake, had there but been once in his voice no fear, but
only love. As it was, that which he still thought of was himself alone.
While crushed with the weight of his brother's surpassing generosity, he
still was filled with only one thought that burned through the darkness
of his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own jeopardy. Even in
the very first hours of his knowledge that the man whom he had believed
dead was living--living and bearing the burden of the guilt he should
have borne--what he was filled with was the imminence of his own peril.

Cecil stood in silence, looking at him. He saw the boyish loveliness he
remembered so well altered into the stronger and fuller beauty of the
man. He saw th