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274 silence with a fierce effort She glanced at him with thai graceful negligence with which she silenced all she would not hear.

"No kingdom would be a tithe so peaceful as your manhood and your honour. Never peril those for any woman; there is not one worth the loss." The flash of a giddy, exultant, incredulous rapture ran like lightning throngh his veins for a moment, She had softly repulsed, but she had not rebuked him; she had known at what his words paused, and the smile she had given him had a light in it that was almost tenderness. He did not ask, he did not think, where his hope began or ended; he did not weigh its meaning, he dared not have drawn it to the light, lest close seen it should have faded; he only felt—

"There it lies!" she pursued, dreamily, resting her eyes on the distant minarets and roofs of Constantinople, rising clear and dark in the lustre of the moon, undimmed by even a floating cloud. "And all its glories are dead. The Porphyry-chamber and the Tyrian dyes, the Pandects and the Labarum, the thunder of Chrysostom and the violets of chiid-Protus—they could not make the city live