d help it; and
again, not as you will, but as I determine. For my friend's sake,
mistress, and if I choose, I will even love you and you shall come to
my hand. Bethink you now what pains you can put on me; but at the
last you shall come and place your neck under my foot, humbly, not
choosing to be loved or hated, only beseeching your master!"

I broke off, half in wonder at my own words and the flame in my
blood, half in dismay to see her, who at first had fronted me
bravely, wince and put up both hands to her face, yet not so as to
cover a tide of shame flushing her from throat to brow.

"Give me leave to shoot him, Princess," said Marc'antonio. But she
shook her head. "He has been talking with some one. . . .
With Stephanu?" His gaze questioned me gloomily. "No, I will do the
dog justice; Stephanu would not talk."

"Lead her away," said I, "and leave me now to mourn my friend."

He touched her by the arm, at the same time promising me with a look
that he would return for an explanation. The Princess shivered, but,
as he stood aside to let her pass, recollected herself and went
before him up the path beneath the pines.

I stepped to where Nat lay and bent over him. I had never till now
been alone with death, and it should have found me terribly alone.
. . . I closed his eyes. . . . And this had been my friend, my
schoolfellow, cleverer than I and infinitely more thoughtful, lacking
no grace but good fortune, and lacking that only by strength of a
spirit too gallant for its fate. In all our friendship it was I that
had taken, he that had given; in the strange path we had entered and
travelled thus far together, it was he that had supplied the courage,
the loyalty, the blithe confidence that life held a prize to be won
with noble weapons; he who had set his face towards the heights and
pinned his faith to the stars; he, the victim of a senseless bullet;
he, stretched here as he had fallen, all thoughts, all activities
quenched, gone out into that night of which the darkness gathering in
this forsaken glade was but a phantom, to be chased away by
to-morrow's sun. To-morrow . . . to-morrow I should go on living and
begin forgetting him. To-morrow? God forgive me for an ingrate, I
had begun already. . . . Even as I bent over him, my uppermost
thought had not been of my friend. I had made, in the moment almost
of his death and across his body, my first acquaintance with passion.
My blood tingled yet with