d they not
all need rest? What if they each sat down among the flowers, beside an
Indian bride? They might live like Christians, while they lived like the
birds of heaven.--

What a dead silence! He looked up and round; the birds had ceased to
chirp; the parroquets were hiding behind the leaves; the monkeys were
clustered motionless upon the highest twigs; only out of the far depths
of the forest, the campanero gave its solemn toll, once, twice, thrice,
like a great death-knell rolling down from far cathedral towers. Was
it an omen? He looked up hastily at Ayacanora. She was watching him
earnestly. Heavens! was she waiting for his decision? Both dropped their
eyes. The decision was not to come from them.

A rustle! a roar! a shriek! and Amyas lifted his eyes in time to see a
huge dark bar shoot from the crag above the dreamer's head, among the
group of girls.

A dull crash, as the group flew asunder; and in the midst, upon the
ground, the tawny limbs of one were writhing beneath the fangs of a
black jaguar, the rarest and most terrible of the forest kings. Of one?
But of which? Was it Ayacanora? And sword in hand, Amyas rushed madly
forward; before he reached the spot those tortured limbs were still.

It was not Ayacanora, for with a shriek which rang through the woods,
the wretched dreamer, wakened thus at last, sprang up and felt for his
sword. Fool! he had left it in his hammock! Screaming the name of his
dead bride, he rushed on the jaguar, as it crouched above its prey, and
seizing its head with teeth and nails, worried it, in the ferocity of
his madness, like a mastiff-dog.

The brute wrenched its head from his grasp, and raised its dreadful paw.
Another moment and the husband's corpse would have lain by the wife's.

But high in air gleamed Amyas's blade; down with all the weight of his
huge body and strong arm, fell that most trusty steel; the head of the
jaguar dropped grinning on its victim's corpse;

"And all stood still, who saw him fall,
While men might count a score."

"O Lord Jesus," said Amyas to himself, "Thou hast answered the devil
for me! And this is the selfish rest for which I would have bartered the
rest which comes by working where Thou hast put me!"

They bore away the lithe corpse into the forest, and buried it under
soft moss and virgin mould; and so the fair clay was transfigured into
fairer flowers, and the poor, gentle, untaught spirit returned to God
who gave it.

And