He turned away and lifted his eyes and saw the golden reefs and rosy cloud-islands of that wonderful dawn. Still the pomp and glory of sunrise filled the sky, for only minutes had passed since he stared upwards and prayed and uttered premises. He marvelled that so much could happen in such a brief compass of time. He mused of this experience and of his former hatred of a psalmist's curse. He had rebelled against that awful petition as being the demon's plea, beyond a good God's power to grant. Yet the thing had happened to himself in this hour: his prayer was turned into sin. And then he hid himself within the hollow and lonely antres of the land. From dawn till dusk he tramped the desert beyond man's sight, and called on darkness to inspire him. Once without set purpose, he returned within sight of the spot where Lovey Lee had fallen. She lay there just as he had struck her down; and there she would lie until the carrion crows scattered her bones. His crime was safe enough from discovery unless it pleased him to reveal it. The deed he gradually grasped; its consequence still evaded his mind; but as he worked backwards in thought he came to Grace. Then he stood still before the vision of her perchance perishing of starvation. He was doubly a murderer; and, to escape that awful imputation, he told himself that the dead woman had lied to torture him; that her tales concerning his amphora were as untrue as the things that she had asserted concerning his child. He strove to find comfort in the thought that her life had stood forfeit to the State; then sophistry faded from him and a man, at best but little versed in the force of speech, stood dumb before a terrific truth. Murder overtook him and stuck to his side like a ponderable, shadow-casting shape. Far away he knew that foxes were creeping at the dim edge of dusk and barking of what they had found. First an aversion from any thought of a human face crowded upon him; then as the stars began to shine, he found himself craving hungrily for the companionship of man. He sat and rested for a while; he drank and watched a young moon in a green sky. The heath rolled here in deep billows, unfretted by stock or stone. As it held unshed waters, so it could suck up darkness; and already detail was dying out of it ere twilight fell. He rose and walked onwards, careless of direction, into a chaos of marsh and broken peat hillocks. His mind worked quicker while his body moved; it stagnated into a slough of sheer blood when he sat still. Deep longing to see a fellow-creature held him; and suddenly, though he was got beyond the power of astonishment, a thing astonishing happened, and he found another man. It was improbable that two human beings had met in this shunned spot for years; perhaps no foot of man had trodden it since some storm-lost miner wandered that way when Elizabeth was queen.