rs, she would have felt his strong arms
around her in a passionate and distasteful embrace. But there was no
fear of this now. She would never have to shrink away from him again. He
was dead!

The warm sunlight was glancing among the thickly growing pine trees in
the plantation by her side, casting quaint shadows on the cone-strewn
ground, across the little piece of broken paling in the bottom of the
dry ditch, and upon the mossy bank where his head was resting upon a
sweet-smelling tuft of heather. Most of all it flashed and glittered
upon the inch or two of steel which still lay buried in his side--a
curiously shaped little dagger which, although she strove to keep her
eyes away from it, seemed to have a sort of fascination for her. Every
time her eyes fell upon it, she turned away quickly with a little
shudder; but, nevertheless, she looked at it more than once--and she
remembered it.

The deep stillness of the autumn afternoon presently became almost
oppressive to her. There was the far-off, sweet low murmur of a placid
sea rolling in upon the base of the cliffs, the constant chirping of
ground insects, and the occasional scurrying of a rabbit through the
undergrowth. Once a great lean rat stole up from the ditch,
and--horrible--ran across his body; but at the sound of her startled
movement it paused, sat for a moment quite still, with its wide-open
black eyes blinking at her, and then to her inexpressible relief
scampered away. She was used to the country, with its intense unbroken
silence, but she had never felt it so hard to bear as on that afternoon.
Time became purely relative to her. As a matter of fact, she knew
afterwards that she could not have been alone more than five minutes. It
was like an eternity. She listened in vain for any human sound, even for
the far-off sweep of the scythe in the bracken, or the call of the
laborer to his horses. The tension of those moments was horrible.

She plucked a handful of bay leaves from the ditch, and strove, by
pressing them against her temple, to cool the fever in her blood. Then
she took up once more her position by his side, for horrible though the
sight of it was, his body seemed to have a sort of fascination for her,
and she could not wander far away from it. Once or twice she had looked
round, but there had been no human figure in sight, nor any sign of any.
But as she knelt there on the short turf, pressing the cool leaves to
her aching forehead, she was sud