“Whenever I begin to hope, I hear that walrus guffaw.” Ky’s master was listening with all his shrinking soul, and his eyes looked straight through the wall, but he spoke as quietly as before. Hildegarde shivered a little. Death itself could hardly remove him further than he had wandered in those few seconds. “Oh, come back!” she said in her heart, and then aloud, “Tell me, please tell me, how I shall manage about Ky?” “Ky?” His eyelids fluttered as he obeyed the call. “Yes, how am I to make her follow me?” “Give her more of your pilot bread.” “Will she leave you at the last for that?” “She won’t know it’s the last, and she is hungry. Aren’t you, Ky?” Hildegarde laid down the knife an instant, took a fragment from her pocket and held it out to the dog. Very doubtfully Ky came nearer. But still she couldn’t make up her mind to trust the new friend’s hand. So Hildegarde laid the coveted morsel down. When Ky had cautiously snapped it up, she hobbled to the bedside and turned her dim eyes to the old familiar bundle. “Yes, I’ve got it safe.” He circled it with an arm, still looking down at the dog. Would he ever let it go of his own free will? What vain notion was this of a fire! Now he was muttering absently, as he smoothed the oilskin: “Our harvest, yours and mine. Whatever we went through in the sowing, it was all nothing, wasn’t it, Ky?—just nothing to bringing the harvest home.” “It wasn’t possible for coming to be worse than going!” “Borisoff would have said no. But Borisoff only tried one way. _We_ know—Ky and I.” In the pause the eyelids closed over lusterless eyes. It was only while he spoke of the journey that he seemed alive. As she looked again at the face, as blank and cold as a grate without a fire, horror fell upon her lest he should die before Cheviot came back. Hildegarde’s little store of splinters and shavings had grown into a heap. “If I make kindling for the fire, I deserve to be told—things—don’t I? Besides, then I can tell her—the face.” “How could you do that?” She must break it gradually. “Wouldn’t it be possible for me to find her out and tell her?” He looked at Hildegarde dreamily an instant. “I wonder,” he said. “I’ll do it, if only you’ll go on—go on.” He made a faint “no,” with the wild head, smiling dimly. “Any one may have a nightmare. No one has ever told a nightmare, so it didn’t sound absurd. It’s a thing you can’t pass on, fortunately. You can’t recover it even for yourself. Of all those last weeks, only three things stand out clear: one was the day I saw the first fox track in the snow.” “You were glad of that?” “Glad of the first sign of life?” “And the second thing?” “The day when I looked south and saw the sky was yellow.” “What did that mean?”