“I often wondered if she ever had moments, as I did, of thinking that that man had never lived. But I could only go on assuming that she gave him every thought she had. I never knew, by the way, what she felt--she never told me. I said, a little while back, that we never saw each other in the clear light of day--only in lightning-flashes. In spite of our semblance of intimacy, that was true. For when a man is obsessed with the notion of wanting to make very definite love to a woman, her impersonal conversation is a kind of haze at best. I know that we talked; but I know that, after the fiasco, when we ate our meals, when we rode side by side along those unspeakable trails, when we sat by the fire in the evening, I hardly knew or cared what we talked of. I kept a kind of office in my brain quite tidy for the transaction of business; the rest was just a sort of House of Usher where I wandered, wanting her. By the time we struck the first Rhodesian village, I didn’t even feel sure I could hold my tongue all the way south and east again. I only prayed to God to deliver me from being an utter and unspeakable brute. That was what my romance had led me to--that I was hanging on to common decency by the eyelids! “You see, there was added to my most inconvenient and unfitting passion for the girl all the psychology of return from a lost battle-field--if you could in name so dignify that pitiful clearing which was our frustration. Everything was over, and why the devil shouldn’t something else begin? That was the refrain my blood kept pounding out. I dare say you don’t understand--you live among the civilized, and are used to reckoning with shadows. It’s different out there on the well-nigh uninhabited veldt. A platitude, I know. Funny how people despise platitudes, when they’re usually the truest things going! A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude at all. Humph! “We struck into northeastern Rhodesia--days and days over the veldt; and after the rains it was blooming like the rose. Gladiolus everywhere--‘white man’s country, past disputing.’ No ‘baked karroo’ there. Pretty starkly uninhabited, though. Of course, we were hundreds of miles north of the mines and the other activities on the edge of the Transvaal. Mashonaland, it would really be more properly called; and it describes it better, sounds wilder--as it was. We were heading west across the tail of Nyassa, and then south--to the Zambesi or the railroad, it didn’t much matter which. That man was as lost to us, every corporal vestige of him, as if his ashes had been scattered like Wycliffe’s. But there on the rampart above Ravello both she and I had felt that the search was imperative: I no less than she. We were both pretty young.” His head dropped on his breast for a moment. He looked as if he felt his burden. I suppose the tortoise sometimes wonders why....