He clutched her hands and kissed them. She felt the hot tears run on them. He wept for her, the poor man wept. She dragged herself close to the bed and tried to speak, tried to tell him that she was so altered. She spoke as if he had nothing to do with it: as if she had been smitten by some strange accident, by some disease, by some malignant and most unhappy fate. He heard her whisper. "I'm, I'm not pretty now," she sobbed dryly. "Ned, I'm not toketie any more!" For once, perhaps, he suffered more than she did: for that time he exceeded her grief, because this was his deed. He groaned. "But if you want me!" "I want you, Mary," he screamed suddenly, "no one else, dear Mary: oh, what a wretch I am!" The best of him, long hidden, long concealed, in a drought of tears, came up at last. He hid his head in the pillow and cried like a child. She sat upon the bed in an urgent desire of maternal help and held his head between her hands. "Poor Ned!" She took him at last in her arms and murmured to him gently. "Oh, oh, my man, my Ned!" He felt the linen on her face and shivered, but spoke no more. She lay down by him and, overcome by her strange pure passion and the fatigue of the miles she had travelled to come to him, she at last fell asleep. Then the slow dawn grew up over the clouds, and came in colour across the sunburnt hills and entered their home. Ned sat up in bed beside her and saw her dear face covered by its shroud. "Help me, oh, God!" said the man. And perhaps help might come, not from any God, but from the deep heart that prayed to the spirit of man which hides in all hearts and only answers to prayer, if it answers at all to any pleading. XX Though the railroad, the mighty railroad, the one and only Railroad of the Big Admiring World, was the chief topic of talk from Montreal to the Pacific, and not least so in little Kamloops by her blue river and lake, yet there was time for talk of other things even there. The men cackled and chattered in saloons and out of them, as is the fashion in sparsely inhabited countries as well as in suburbs, of all the windy ways of men. Like dust was the talk lifted up, like dust it fell and rose again. And the boys often talked of Ned, who, it seemed, had struck a new streak of virtue and avoidance of liquor. "'Twas nip and tuck with him and the law," said one, "and he's still scared." "True 'nough, Indian Mary nigh payssed in her checks. One more cut and she'd ha' bin mimaloose. They say so at the hawspital," said another. "I wonder if he's done with Pitt River Pete, yet," wondered a third. "D'ye think he druv them steers into the cañon?" "Who else? No, Ned Quin ain't through with Pete. Now I like Pete, he's a first-class Siwash, not bad by no means. And I never cottoned to Ned. He's got religion now, eh? Oh, shucks!"