"Arrest him," he said simply.
Cecil offered no resistance; he let them seize and disarm him without an
effort at the opposition which could have been but a futile, unavailing
trial of brute force. He dreaded lest there should be one sound that
should reach her in that tent where the triad of standards drooped in
the dusky distance. He had been, moreover, too long beneath the yoke of
that despotic and irresponsible authority to waste breath or to waste
dignity in vain contest with the absolute and the immutable. He was
content with what he had done--content to have met once, not as soldier
to chief, but as man to man, the tyrant who held his fate.
For once, beneath the spur of that foul outrage to the dignity and the
innocence of the woman he had quitted, he had allowed a passionate
truth to force its way through the barriers of rank and the bonds of
subservience. Insult to himself he had borne as the base prerogative
of his superior, but insult to her he had avenged with the vengeance of
equal to equal, of the man who loved on the man who calumniated her.
And as he sat in the darkness of the night with the heavy tramp of his
guards forever on his ear, there was peace rather than rebellion in his
heart--the peace of one heartsick with strife and with temptation, who
beholds in death a merciful ending to the ordeal of existence. "I shall
die in her cause at least," he thought. "I could be content if I were
only sure that she would never know.
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