and he gave over.

Both crawled to their feet. Hans staggered back against the wall, where
he leaned, his face working, in his throat the deep and continuous rumble
that died away with the seconds and at last ceased. The time for the
reaction had come. Edith stood in the middle of the floor, wringing her
hands, panting and gasping, her whole body trembling violently.

Hans looked at nothing, but Edith's eyes wandered wildly from detail to
detail of what had taken place. Dennin lay without movement. The
overturned chair, hurled onward in the mad whirl, lay near him. Partly
under him lay the shot-gun, still broken open at the breech. Spilling
out of his right hand were the two cartridges which he had failed to put
into the gun and which he had clutched until consciousness left him.
Harkey lay on the floor, face downward, where he had fallen; while Dutchy
rested forward on the table, his yellow mop of hair buried in his mush-
plate, the plate itself still tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees.
This tilted plate fascinated her. Why did it not fall down? It was
ridiculous. It was not in the nature of things for a mush-plate to up-
end itself on the table, even if a man or so had been killed.

She glanced back at Dennin, but her eyes returned to the tilted plate. It
was so ridiculous! She felt a hysterical impulse to laugh. Then she
noticed the silence, and forgot the plate in a desire for something to
happen. The monotonous drip of the coffee from the table to the floor
merely emphasized the silence. Why did not Hans do something? say
something? She looked at him and was about to speak, when she discovered
that her tongue refused its wonted duty. There was a peculiar ache in
her throat, and her mouth was dry and furry. She could only look at
Hans, who, in turn, looked at her.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a sharp, metallic clang. She
screamed, jerking her eyes back to the table. The plate had fallen down.
Hans sighed as though awakening from sleep. The clang of the plate had
aroused them to life in a new world. The cabin epitomized the new world
in which they must thenceforth live and move. The old cabin was gone
forever. The horizon of life was totally new and unfamiliar. The
unexpected had swept its wizardry over the face of things, changing the
perspective, juggling values, and shuffling the real and the unreal into
perplexing confusion.

"My God, Hans!" was Edith's first speech.

H