The cars were severally hauled to the scales shed, weighed, and then shoved upon a section of track that, after they were chained, sharply tilted and discharged the loads into a pit from which the endless belt of a cane carrier wound into the invisible roller crushers. The heavy air was charged with the smooth oiled tumult of machinery, the blast whistles of varied signals, and the harshness of escaping steam. Other houses, smaller than Daniel's but for the rest resembling it, were strung along the open--the dwellings of the Assistant Administrador, the Chief Electrician, a Superintendent, and two or three more that Lee hadn't identified. He had been, now, nearly four weeks with Daniel, and the details of La Quinta, the procedure of the sugar, were generally familiar to him. However, he had had very little opportunity to talk to his brother: the difficulties, in Cobra and Havana, of shipping Savina's body back to New York--William Grove, persuaded that it was unnecessary, hadn't come to Cuba; a fire in one of the out-lying colonias of the La Quinta estate, that had destroyed three caballerias of ratoon; the sheer tyranny of an intricate process which, for seven months in the year, was not allowed to pause, had kept Lee from any satisfactory communication of his feelings or convictions. But, at last, returning hot and fatigued from the clearing, by fire, of a tumba, Daniel had been sitting with him for more than an hour, and he showed no signs of immediate change or activity. “What you say is clear enough,” Lee Randon admitted; “and yet--but I can't see where--there is a sophistry in it.” Daniel made a gesture both curt and indifferent. “I tell you it would be better, even at the destruction of the entire present world, to establish honesty. Since you have referred to me--what we, Savina and I, did was, simply, honest; but, again as you pointed out, its effect around us, for bad or very possibly good, was brought to nothing by the way it was drawn back into the victorious conspiring of sham. Even I don't know which, commendable or fatal, it was; I haven't been able to find out; I hadn't time. But Savina preferred the two weeks we had together to an infinity of the other. Fancett may call it an acute dilatation of the heart, but it was happiness that killed her. It's possible for me to say that because, fundamentally, I didn't bring it to her. Savina found it, created it, for herself. Through that time--was it long or short? The two weeks seemed a life--she was herself, superior.” “How about you?” “I was absolutely contented,” Lee replied. “Isn't that a pale word for an act of passion?”