All night Delaroche sat by the bed of his wife, in the big, empty, ruined convent. The rain drummed fiercely upon the tin roof, giant rats scurried to and fro in the darkness, and the night long there came from the cot the desolate plaint. Once, toward dawn, she started up suddenly and he caught her. "Laddie, laddie!" she cried, with a great joy in her voice as she felt his presence. Then she fell back into the stupor. At noon the wagon came, driven by an old army packer, a long lanky Westerner. The cot was placed upon it and fastened, and they started. It was in the midst of the rainy season; the roads were bottomless, and progress was fearfully slow. Twice, before reaching Jimamaylan, the wagon dropped into a hole and could not be budged. The men went out into the fields and captured carabaos, and after countless efforts unmired it. At Jimamaylan, fifteen miles from the start, the horses were so plainly given out that they had to stop. They passed the night in the hut of the Presidente. The driver cooked their food and Delaroche filled the canteens with boiled water for the morrow, for they were on the edge of the cholera district. His wife was in the same condition. They started early the next morning, but calamities began to overtake them. They were mired for an hour soon after the start. Then the tree carried away and they had to improvise a new one. Near Binalbagan the off horse dropped, foundered. They stole carabaos from the fields and went on. Darkness overtook them at Jinagaran, and they had gone only ten miles. All night long Delaroche listened to the gentle wail, and by morning it had grown very weak. And then, as the sun rose a few miles from Jinagaran, she died. "She died." That's the way he said it. And the wagon went on with the dead woman, and Delaroche kneeling with his head on her pillow, close to hers. And after a while he began calling her, first softly, with gentle insistence, "Girlie! Girlie!" Then louder and louder as she did not answer, in a long, agonised cry, "Girlie! Girlie!" They were going through the cholera district now, and they passed deserted barrios with great, white crosses painted across the doors and windows of the emptied huts; and now and then thin, cadaverous, weird beings looked at them pass from caved-in eyes, looked at the labouring, sobbing carabaos; at the driver on the seat of the lurching wagon, urging with cry and gesture; at the cot, with its rigid form faintly outlined beneath the blankets, and the man kneeling by it; and, above the shouts of the driver, the panting of the animals, the creaking of the wagon, they heard that great ceaseless agonised cry: "Girlie! Girlie!" All day, and the next, and the next, they went on thus, a spectral sight. I asked the driver about it later.