On they plodded. While a heaviness appeared in his manner, her bearing was cheerful and spirited. A sadness that he made no effort to conceal and that she bravely hid oppressed them both. To find him sad was sufficient to tinge her sadness with happiness. They rested at short intervals, for the exertion soon began to tell upon them, but upon him the more. They slaked their thirst from the river. To the woman it seemed a spring-time stroll through flowering fields, softened by the sweet sadness of May. To him it was a task that brought them step by step nearer to the end, where he must deal her the crudest blow of her life. For at the end she expected news of her father. She would hear it, and from the one who would have been the most glad to spare her. But she must not know yet. All her strength was needed for the task before her. It is time to break hearts when their breaking can be no longer deferred. He had been trudging ahead. He must have suspected that she observed the labor with which he walked, the uncontrollable tendency of his knees to give way, the reeling that now would send him against the bank, and then upon the outer edge of the grade; for presently he asked her to walk ahead. She complied. Their slow and laborious work presently made it impossible for them to talk. They went on in silence. After they had proceeded thus for some hours, a thing occurred that struck dismay to her soul. Her companion suddenly became voluble. At first he was coherent, although he talked about matters to which she was a total stranger. This showed an alarming unconsciousness of her presence. As he talked, he became more and more incoherent, and at times laughed inanely. Presently, with awe in his voice, he said,-- “She was the woman I loved. She’s dead, boys, she’s dead; and by God! they killed her.” Her spirit sank. After all that she had hoped and yearned for, there now had come back the most terrible of the ghosts of the bitter past. After all the seeming bridging of the chasm that had separated them, it opened now all the wider and deeper and darker. “Do you know what a murderer is?” he exclaimed in a loud voice, as he swung his arm threateningly aloft. “A she-wolf, the slyest and most dangerous of beasts. She comes whining and fawning; she licks your hand; she wins your trust. And then, when you have warmed her, and patched her torn skin, and mended her broken bones, she turns upon you and tears out your heart with her fangs.” Stifling, faint, barely able to stand, the young woman stood aside, and he passed her without seeing her.