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.
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