d apart for hours as the days passed,
thinking of his part; and yet the icy bitterness held him from action.

Sometimes his heart seemed dying; chill already upon it. Again he
seemed filled with a strange vitality, other than his own. This
phenomenon frightened him more than the first, so that he would hurry
to look at Carlin lest the strength had come from her. He tried to
_think_ the strength back to her; to think all his own besides; but
there was no drive to his mind-work because he did not have faith in
himself.

At length came the night when the fever birds ceased for Carlin. Out
of a great soft depth of tone which no one but Skag had heard before
(which he had thought no other would hear until there was a baby in her
arms), her words came with unforgettable intensity:

"Oh, the jungle shadows! The jungle shadows!"

After that he did not know whether it was night or day, until he heard
the end of a sentence from the doctor from Poona:

". . . only four hours left to break the fever."

The room was in great still heat--heat of a burning night, a smothering
heat to the couch from a distant lamp--the fire of the day coming up
from the ground like flashes of anger. . . .

A strange stillness was settling on everything; the silence before had
not been so heavy. The old family doctor from Poona came into it; and
Margaret Annesley stood by him near the bed.

"Carlin has not spoken for more than an hour," Skag heard her tell him.

It seemed long before he answered:

"She has passed too far down into the shadows. She will not speak
again."

The words came to Skag as if through limitless space; but the last ones
penetrated deep and laid hold.

Margaret went out swiftly and the doctor followed. He looked a very,
very old man--with his head bent, like that.

. . . She will not speak again!

The universe was falling into disruption.

It was all white where she lay. Only the heavy masses of her dark
hair, spread on the pillows and across one shoulder, showed any
colour--shadowed gold, shadowed red.

. . . She will not speak again!

Seven tall men filed into the room before Skag's eyes, and ranged on
either side of her. These were her own brothers. Skag felt the vague
pang again, of being alien to them.

Roderick Deal, the eldest--the one with the inscrutable blackness of
eyes--leaned and kissed the white, white forehead; and a fold of the
splendid hair.

One figure had gone down at the lowe