Without a word he dropped her hand, and turned abruptly and walked unsteadily from the hut out into the warm dusk; and as he went, stumbling and feeling his way like a man suddenly blinded, a sound reached his ears, the sound of a man's sneering laugh of triumph. A wave of unrestrained passion swept over him. He stood still, hesitated, and looked back: then, still stumbling as he walked, he hurried on into the shadows. CHAPTER THIRTY ONE. What happened to him during his hurried flight from the rondavel Matheson never knew. He was conscious only of walking, walking heavily and unseeingly, forward into the dusk, when night abruptly overtook him and wrapped him in a darkness more complete than anything he had ever imagined. When again it was light he woke, with an unrefreshed feeling and a sense of having been victimised by an ugly dream of extraordinary vividness, to find himself lying comfortably in Herman Nel's bed in the rondavel, with an utter absence of any knowledge of how he came there. He could not recollect going to bed overnight. Resting quietly on the pillow in semi-wakefulness, his drowsy thoughts occupied themselves with speculating on what had happened. Little by little the events of the previous evening recurred to him, but always with that dreamlike sense of unreality that left him unable to determine what was actual and what only imaginary. The sudden sharp pain of his wound which, when he moved abruptly, he felt for the first time since waking, brought bade clearly to his memory the scene of the struggle with Holman and Honor's intervention, assuring him that this was no dream but ugly reality. He had seen again the woman he loved; had been unfaithful in thought to the woman who loved him; had been at death-grips with his enemy; and now lay sick from the wound he had sustained--more side in mind than in body, conscious chiefly of the stupefying fact that this woman whom he loved so dearly was the wife of the man he had sought to kill, that that fact rendered his enmity innocuous; he could not strike at Honor through any one she loved.