e prayed that I might go with him. But I could not die
unforgiven, and I was right, for you have come out of the world to help
me, and to save me."

"Yes, to help you and to save you,--if I can," he added in a whisper to
himself, for he was full of foreboding. He was of the earth, earthy,
and things that had chanced to him this day were beyond the natural and
healthy movements of his mind. He had gone forth to slay, and had been
foiled by shadows; he had come with a tragic, if beautiful, memory
haunting him, and that memory had clothed itself in flesh and stood
before him, pitiful, solitary,--a woman. He had scorned all legend and
superstition, and here both were made manifest to him. He had thought
of this woman as one who was of this world no more, and here she mourned
before him and bade him go and look upon her dead, upon the man who
had wronged him, into whom, as he once declared, the soul of a cur had
entered,--and now what could he say? He had carried in his heart the
infinite something that is to men the utmost fulness of life, which,
losing, they must carry lead upon their shoulders where they thought the
gods had given pinions.

McGann and Pierre were nervous. This conjunction of unusual things was
easier to the intelligences of the dead than the quick. The outer air
was perhaps less charged with the unnatural, and with a glance towards
the room where death was quartered, they left the hut.

Trafford was alone with the woman through whom his life had been turned
awry. He looked at her searchingly; and as he looked the mere man in
him asserted itself for a moment. She was dressed in coarse garments; it
struck him that her grief had a touch of commonness about it; there was
something imperfect in the dramatic setting. His recent experiences
had had a kind of grandeur about them; it was not thus that he had
remembered her in the hour when he had called upon her in the plains,
and the Indian had heard his cry. He felt, and was ashamed in feeling,
that there was a grim humour in the situation. The fantastic, the
melodramatic, the emotional, were huddled here in too marked a
prominence; it all seemed, for an instant, like the tale of a woman's
first novel. But immediately again there was roused in him the latent
force of loyalty to himself and therefore to her; the story of her past,
so far as he knew it, flashed before him, and his eyes grew hot.

He remembered the time he had last seen her in an English country