"God reward you! God keep you! If I stay, I shall tell you all. Let me
go, and forget that we ever met! I am dead--let me be dead to you!"

With another instant he had left the tent and passed out into the red
glow of the torchlit evening. And Venetia Corona dropped her proud head
down upon the silken cushions where his own had rested, and wept as
women weep over their dead--in such a passion as had never come to her
in all the course of her radiant, victorious, and imperious life.

It seemed to her as if she had seen him slain in cold blood, and had
never lifted her hand or her voice against his murder.

His voice rang in her ear; his face was before her with its white,
still, rigid anguish; the burning accents of his avowal of love seemed
to search her very heart. If this man perished in any of the thousand
perils of war she would forever feel herself his assassin. She had his
secret, she had his soul, she had his honor in her hands; and she could
do nothing better for them both than to send him from her to eternal
silence, to eternal solitude!

Her thoughts grew unbearable; she rose impetuously from her couch and
paced to and fro in the narrow confines of her tent. Her tranquillity
was broken down; her pride was abandoned; her heart, at length, was
reached and sorely wounded. The only man she had ever found, whom it
would have been possible to her to have loved, was one already severed
from her by a fate almost more hideous than death.

And yet, in her loneliness, the color flushed back into her face; her
eyes gathered some of their old light; one dreaming, shapeless fancy
floated vaguely through her mind.

If, in the years to come, she knew him in all ways worthy, and learned
to give him back this love he bore her, it was in her to prove that
love, no matter what cost to her pride and her lineage. If his perfect
innocence were made clear in her own sight, there was greatness and
there was unselfishness enough in her nature to make her capable of
regarding alone his martyrdom and his heroism, and disregarding the
opinion of the world. If, hereafter, she grew to find his presence the
necessity of her life, and his sacrifice of that nobility and of that
purity she now believed it, she--proud as she was with the twin pride of
lineage and of nature--would be capable of incurring the odium and the
marvel of all who knew her by uniting her fate to his own, by making
manifest her honor and her tenderness for him, th