“You have killed my friend,” said I, “who desired only your good.  You have chosen to humiliate me, who willed you no harm.  And now you say ‘it shall be vendetta.’  Very well, it shall be vendetta, but as I choose it.  Keep your foolish weapons; I can do without them.  Heap what insults you will upon me; I am a man and will bear them.  But you are a woman, and therefore to be mastered.  For my friend’s sake I choose to hate you and to be patient.  For my friend’s sake, who discovered your need, I too will discover it and 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.