in a dead faint on the floor, carried her between them
into her own room. While they revived her, others of the community
undertook the remaining responsibilities, for tropical heat leaves brief
time for mourning ceremonies.

Slaughter, left to himself, loosened his horse from where some one had
hitched him to the fence, and led him, walking slowly, down the township
road and away in the direction of the Three-mile. He walked on, with the
reins loosely looped over his shoulder, the horse, as though it knew
his mood, measuring its steps to his, and keeping its head just level
with him. The warm, dry air, scarcely more than a breath of wind, caught
the dust as it rose from their footsteps, and drifted it, in a filmy,
moving cloud, all around and over them. The horse snorted now and again
as it felt the irritation in its nostrils, and blinked its eyes, until
they were almost closed, to escape it; but Slaughter walked on oblivious
to the dust, to the heat, to the time, to everything, save the growing
consciousness of a dull mental pain that was beginning to gnaw and goad
him into a state of mind very different to that which had held him while
he was offering his sympathy to Ailleen. The years of bitter solitude,
the years of cynical brooding over the wrongs that had come into his
life, had built up an influence over him that was not to be dissipated
by a momentary wave of sympathetic impulse. More than that, the
sympathetic impulse had not been allowed to expend itself; as it
developed it had been checked by the apparent unresponsiveness of its
object, until, at the moment of its greatest vitality, it was abruptly
arrested by the shock of Ailleen's collapse. And in that it was in
keeping with all the other experiences Slaughter had known whenever the
softer side of his nature, the love impulses of his being, were called
into activity; always there had been a check put upon him which made the
exercise restrained and restricted up to the time when a final shock had
effectually arrested it, and turned his love and kindliness back, turned
them away from their natural outlet to force them in upon themselves,
until, in the succeeding turmoil and confusion, only bitterness and
lonely brooding resulted.

Over the whole distance between the school-house and the solitary
Three-mile he walked on, brooding and bitter. The action of the woman
who turned from him when she first saw him after her arrival at
Birralong, came to be viewed i