though what might be the state and occupations of
those dead he did not know. Yet he believed--why he could not tell--that
they were affected vitally by their acts and behaviour here; and his
intelligence warned him that good must always flow from good, and evil
from evil. To kill this man was evil, and of it only evil could come.

What did he care whether Hafela ruled the nation or Nodwengo, and
whether it worshipped the God of the Christians or the god of Fire--who,
by the way, had proved himself so singularly inefficient in the hour of
trial. Now that he thought of it, he much preferred Nodwengo to Hafela,
for the one was a just man and the other a tyrant; and he himself was
more comfortable as a wealthy private person than he had been as a head
medicine-man and a chief of wizards. He would let things stand; he would
prevent the Messenger from eating of that fruit. A word could do it; he
had but to suggest that it was unripe or not wholesome at this season of
the year, and it would be cast aside.

All these reflections, or their substance, passed through Hokosa's
mind in a few instants of time, and already he was rising to go to
the verandah and translate their moral into acts, when another thought
occurred to him--How should he face Noma with this tale? He could give
up his own ambitions, but could he bear her mockery, as day by day
she taunted him with his faint-heartedness and reproached him with his
failure to regain greatness and to make her great? He forgot that he
might conceal the truth from her; or rather, he did not contemplate such
concealment, of which their relations were too peculiar and too intimate
to permit. She hated him, and he worshipped her with a half-inhuman
passion--a passion so unnatural, indeed, that it suggested the horrid
and insatiable longings of the damned--and yet their souls were naked
to each other. It was their fate that they could hide nothing each from
each--they were cursed with the awful necessity of candour.

It would be impossible that he should keep from Noma anything that he
did or did not do; it would be still more impossible that she should
conceal from him even such imaginings and things as it is common for
women to hold secret. Her very bitterness, which it had been policy for
her to cloak or soften, would gush from her lips at the sight of him;
nor, in the depth of his rage and torment, could he, on the other hand,
control the ill-timed utterance of his continual and o