dily beauty that he adored. He felt as though her soul
hovered about him, wailing to him not to be so cruel, tugging at his
garments with imploring, impalpable hands.

The thing must be done, though, before the sordid life stirred again under
the roof of the tavern, before the vulgar faces, with their greedy, prying
eyes, should be there to snigger and spy.

He loaded a great basket with fine gravelly sand, and carried it down and
laid it on her by handfuls. What were his livid, parched lips muttering?
Over and over, only this:

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ..."

Soon the white swathed-up form was hidden with the sandy gravel. That was
a terrible pang. It wrenched the first groan from him, but he worked on.

More and more of the sandy gravel, but for precaution the stones must lie
above. Should the voracious creatures of the night come, they must find
the treasure in impregnable security. That thought helped him to lay in
the first, and the second, and then greater and greater stones. He was
spent and breathless, but still he laboured. He tottered, and at times the
tavern and the veld, and the waggons on it, and the flat-topped distant
mountains that merged in the horizon, swung round him in a wild, mad
dance. Then the warm salt taste of blood was in his mouth, and he gasped
and panted, but he never rested until the grave was filled in.

Then he built up over it an oblong cairn of the ironstone boulders, made a
rude temporary cross out of a spare waggon-pole, working quite
methodically with saw and hammer and nails, and set it up, under the
curious eyes he hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt down
stiffly, and made, with rusty, long unpractised fingers, the sacred sign
upon his face and breast. He heard her still, asking him in that nearly
extinguished voice of hers, to pray for her.

"Dicky!..."

Ah! the tragedy of the foolish little nickname, faltered by stiffening
lips upon the bed of death!

"Catholics pray for the souls of dead people, don't they? Pray for mine
by-and-by. It will comfort me to know you are praying, darling, even if
God is too angry with us to hear!"

He held her to his bursting heart, groaning.

"If He is angry, it cannot be with you. The sin was mine--all mine. He
must know!"

Later she awakened from a troubled sleep to murmur:

"Richard, I dreamed of Bridget-Mary. She was all in black, but there was
white linen about her face and neck, and it was dabbled drea