Then, with a glance instinct with dread, he saw that he was right--Savina had died. A calm of desperation swept over him. He must tell Daniel and the doctor. But they would still need the ice. The revolting details! And what had Fancett meant? It must all come out now--his presence in Cuba with Savina--in a storm of publicity and condemnation. He regretted this, because of Savina, dead. Alive she would have smiled her contempt; but death was different. Anyone would acknowledge that. The dead should be protected from slurs and scandal and obscene comments. A confusion of small facts poured through him, and broke into trivial fragments any single dignity of emotion; no generous sorrow saved him from the petty actuality of his situation; even his sense of loss, he realized dismayed, was dull. Savina was rapidly growing, at last, cold; her arm was stiffening in the position in which he had left it; in a necessary forcible gentleness he composed her body. But he didn't hide her--not yet--with a sheet. That would follow soon enough. The blueness was receding, leaving her pinched, but white. She had always been pale.... By God, he had forgotten to tell them. Lee, stumbling down the stairs, found Daniel, the doctor, and the proprietor of the hotel, Venalez, talking together. As he approached there was a flash of premonition on his brother's broad unstirring face. Lee said humbly: “She is dead.” Fancett, with Daniel Randon, went up at once, but he lingered, facing the Cuban. Venalez had a long brown countenance, with a disordered moustache. His trousers were thrust into the customary dingy boots, but his shirt was confined at the waist, and he had dispensed with a machete. He grew uneasy under Lee's stare, and shuffled his feet; then, behind a soiled thin hand, he coughed. It was clear that he wished intensely to escape, but was held by his conceptions of the obligations of conduct. “The suddenness--” Lee said, and then paused with a furrowed brow; “that's what surprises me. She was as well as you, and singing, yes--singing, that she didn't want to be a wife. I thought she had tripped on the loose silk thing she wore; and then I was certain that she had fainted from your heat.” He bore heavily on the word your, and then proceeded to curse the atmosphere, in a heavy manner suggesting that it were a property, a condition, under the direction of the hotel proprietor. From that he proceeded to damn Utica and the state of Ohio. “But you can't understand me,” he added, illogically angry at that, too. Daniel was again at his side, speaking. “There is nothing for you to do here, and you may as well come to the batey with me. There are some accidents that cannot be provided against. This is one of them. She will be attended to; but you must explain about the cables.”