He was so moved by that sight, Herman said, and for the moment so little believing in it, that he had no realization of how the others looked at it nor what they might have felt. He was first roused to take note of his companions by seeing the smith turn from the body with a movement of deprecation, and the sudden swinging of Mancha’s hammer into position. He heard it click as it rose against the roof of the cave. He heard an exclamation but could not tell for the life of him whether he himself had not uttered it; and then he saw the hammer caught from behind by the girl’s father. “Mine,” he said; “mine, not yours.” Prassade was as fierce upon the point as if some one had denied it: his the greater offense, to him the punishment. Then as quietly as Mancha’s hammer dropped, the wrath of Prassade fell off before the unimpassioned quietness of the Ward. Stillness seemed to rise from her and crowd them out of the narrow chamber into the overhung and guarded entrance where the woman sat winding and unwinding the long coils of her hair. They did not look at the Ward again nor back at what Prassade did; it was a relief to watch the woman. She stood up and her head was high, her lip was bitten red, two spots of color glowed upon her cheeks. She looked at Ravenutzi as a child might who has broken a delicate thing and refuses to be chidden for it. “The place was too small for us both,” she said, and then after a little: “I thought you would never come,” with a gesture of weary, ineffable tenderness. “Oh, I thought you would never come.” She was all alive to him and very beautiful, so flushed and so alive you could not understand that death could be so close behind her. All the rushing of her blood and the swaying of her slender figure demanded of him what, even with death behind, he could not deny. He took her in his arms. He put up his hand to turn her face on his shoulder away from the hard eyes of the men. But he could not conceal as he did so the flush upon his own and the tremor of renewal. Whatever the girl had been to him, she was now the evidence of how much his wife had loved him; as much as _that_! It was a declaration which shamed him by its publicity but purchased him anew to passion and protecting tenderness. They stood so, she superbly conscious of her right to a place she had cleared for herself, and he still shielding her. Nobody spoke a word. Behind in the cavern Prassade put back the dead girl’s hair from her soiling blood and covered up her breast. Presently he called Mancha, and the others by one consent moved down the water-worn way, out of the sound of their sorrow. Ravenutzi’s arm was still about his wife. At the foot of the ascent he put her from him quietly.