“But why?  If all this could be cleared——­”

“It never can be.”

The baffled sense of impotence against the granite wall of some immovable calamity which she had felt before came on her.  She had been always used to be obeyed, followed, and caressed; to see obstacles crumble, difficulties disappear, before her wish; she had not been tried by any sorrow, save when, a mere child still, she felt the pain of her father’s death; she had been lapped in softest luxury, crowned with easiest victory.  The sense that here there was a tragedy whose meaning she could not reach, that there was here a fate that she could not change or soften, brought a strange, unfamiliar feeling of weakness before a hopeless and cruel doom that was no more to be altered by her will than the huge, bare rocks of Africa, out yonder in the glare of noon, were to be lifted by her hand.  For she knew that this man, who made so light of perils that would have chilled many to the soul in terror, and who bore so quiet and serene a habit beneath the sharpest stings and hardest blows of his adversities, would not speak thus without full warrant; would not consign himself to this renunciation of every hope, unless he were compelled to it by a destiny from which there was no escape.

She was silent some moments, her eyes resting on him with that grave and luminous regard which no man had ever changed to one more tender or less calmly contemplative.  He had risen again, and paced to and fro the narrow chamber; his head bent down, his chest rising and falling with the labored, quickened breath.  He had thought that the hour in which his brother’s ingratitude had pierced his heart had been the greatest suffering he had ever known, or ever could know; but a greater had waited on him here, in the fate to which the jeweled toy that he had lifted from the water had accidentally led him, not dreaming to what he came.

“Lord Royallieu,” she said softly, at length, while she rose and moved toward him, the scarlet of the trailing cashmeres gathering dark, ruby lights in them as they caught sun and shadow; and at the old name, uttered in her voice, he started, and turned, and looked at her as though he saw some ghost of his past life rise from its grave.  “Why look at me so?” she pursued ere he could speak.  “Act how you will, you cannot change the fact that you are the bearer of your father’s title.  So long as you live, your brother Berkeley can never take it legally.  You may be a Chasseur of the African Army, but none the less are you a Peer of England.”

“What means that?” he muttered.  “Why tell me that?  I have said I am dead.  Leave me buried here, and let him enjoy what he may—­what he can.”

“But this is folly—­madness——­”

“No; it is neither.  I have told you I should stand as a felon in the eyes of the English law; I should have no civil rights; the greatest mercy fate can show me is to let me remain forgotten here.  It will not be long, most likely, before I am thrust into the African sand, to rot like that brave soul out yonder.  Berkeley will be the lawful holder of the title then; leave him in peace and possession now.”