se that broke him. Starting
to run when he first saw the cobra on the threshold, he counted
Failure. That burst of speed for ten steps had put the king into
fighting mood. Skag had beaten thin in his own mind the possibility of
ever committing Failure again. A man must not lose his nerve in the
stress of a loved one's peril. One doesn't act so well to bring the
event to a winning. In fact, there is no excuse and no advantage and
no decency in losing one's nerve, any time, any place. . . .

Skag had _known_ things in certain seconds of his duel with the cobra.
(Mostly, a man only thinks he knows.) Carlin had stood on the
threshold, not more than fifteen feet away, while he was engaged. No
one had told him at that time, that the man does not live who can
continue to keep off a fighting cobra from striking home; but Skag
learned in that short interval. He faced not only the fastest thing he
had ever seen move, but it was also the _stillest_. It would come to a
dead stop before him--stillness compared to which a post or a wall is
mere squat inertia. This lifted head and hood was sustained,
elate--having the moveless calm one might imagine at the centre of a
solar system. Its outline was mysteriously clear. Often the
background was Carlin's own self. The action took place in the period
of the Indian afterglow, in which one can see better than in brilliant
sunlight, a light that breathes soft and delicate effulgences. The
cobra at the point of stillness was like dark dulled jewels against
it--dulled so that the raying of the jewels would not obscure the
contour.

And once toward the last, as he fought (the inside of his head feeling
like a smear of opened arteries), Skag had seen Carlin over the hood of
the cobra. She had seemed utterly tall, utterly enfolding; his
relation to her, one of the inevitables of creation. Nothing could
ever happen to take her away for long. Matters which men call life and
death were mere exigencies of his scheme and hers _together_.

In a word, it was a breath of the thing he had been yearning for, from
the moment he first saw her in the monkey glen; the need was the core
of the anguish he had known in the long pursuit of the thief elephant;
the thing that must come to a man and a maid who have found each other,
if there is to be any equity in the romantic plan at all, unless the
two are altogether asleep and content in the tight dimensions of
three-score-and-ten.

Skag had