at life had gone softly, smoothly, joyously, with this
weak and feminine nature; and that, in the absence of temptation to
evil, its career had been fair and straight in the sight of the world.
He saw that his brother had been, in one word, happy. He saw that
happiness had done for this character what adversity had done for his
own. He saw that by it had been saved a temperament that calamity would
have wrecked. He stood and looked at him, but he spoke not one word;
whatever he felt, he restrained from all expression.

The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, even in those
pale, gray moonbeams, he shunned the light that was about him.

"We believed you were dead," he murmured wildly. "They said so; there
seemed every proof. But when I saw you yesterday, I knew you--I knew
you, though you passed me as a stranger. I stayed on here; they told me
you would return. God! what agony this day and night have been!"

Cecil was silent still; he knew that this agony had been the dread lest
he should be living.

There were many emotions at war in him--scorn, and pity, and wounded
love, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude denied, or quote a
sacrifice that was almost without parallel in generosity, all held him
speechless. To overwhelm the sinner before him with reproaches, to count
and claim the immeasurable debts due to him, to upbraid and to revile
the wretched weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not his own
to rest upon him--to do aught of this was not in him. Long ago he had
accepted the weight of an alien crime, and borne it as his own; to undo
now all that he had done in the past, to fling out to ruin now the
one whom he had saved at such a cost; to turn, after twelve years, and
forsake the man, all coward though he was, whom he had shielded for
so long--this was not possible to him. Though it would be but his own
birthright that he would demand, his own justification that he would
establish, it would have seemed to him like a treacherous and craven
thing. No matter that the one for whom the sacrifice had been made was
unworthy of it, he held that every law of honor and justice forbade him
now to abandon his brother and yield him up to the retribution of his
early fault. It might have been a folly in the first instance; it might
even have been a madness, that choice of standing in his brother's place
to receive the shame of his brother's action; but it had been done so
long before--done on the