ve him.

Cecil for a while again was silent, standing there by the newly made
grave of the soldier who had been faithful as those of his own race and
of his own Order never had been. His heart was full. The ingratitude and
the self-absorption of this life for which his own had been destroyed
smote him with a fearful suffering. And only a few hours before he
had looked once more on the face of the beloved friend of his youth; a
deadlier sacrifice than to lay down wealth, and name, and heritage, and
the world's love, was to live on, leaving that one comrade of his early
days to believe him dead after a deed of shame.

His brother sank down on the mound of freshly flung earth, sinking his
head upon his arms with a low moan. Time had not changed him greatly;
it had merely made him more intensely desirous of the pleasures and the
powers of life, more intensely abhorrent of pain, of censure, of the
contempt of the world. As, to escape these in his boyhood, he had
stooped to any degradation, so, to escape them in his manhood, he was
capable of descending to any falsehood or any weakness. His was one
of those natures which, having no love of evil for evil's sake, still
embrace any form of evil which may save them from the penalty of their
own weakness. Now, thus meeting one who for twelve years he had believed
must rise from the tomb itself to reproach or to accuse him, unstrung
his every nerve, and left him with only one consciousness--the desire,
at all costs, to be saved.

Cecil's eyes rested on him with a strange, melancholy pity. He had loved
his brother as a youth--loved him well enough to take and bear a heavy
burden of disgrace in his stead. The old love was not dead; but stronger
than itself was his hatred of the shame that had touched their race by
the wretched crime that had driven him into exile, and his wondering
scorn for the feeble and self-engrossed character that had lived
contentedly under false colors, and with a hidden blot screened by a
fictitious semblance of honor. He could not linger with him; he did
not know how to support the intolerable pain that oppressed him in the
presence of the only living creature of his race; he could not answer
for himself what passionate and withering words might not escape him;
every instant of their interview was a horrible temptation to him--the
temptation to demand from this coward his own justification before
the world--the temptation to seize out of those unworthy han