On finding the drink untouched when tidying the room on the morning of Sabina’s death, she had set it aside. Cocoa can be warmed up. Putting it on the linhay shelf she had not thought of it again until Leadville, walking in his sleep, had revealed the nature of the draught. Even then she had not thrown it away. It was evidence which might be needed. "’Tis out there still," and with a slight movement of the head she indicated the linhay. If she could convince Byron that he was not guilty of his wife’s death, she might lessen for him his sense of overwhelming disaster, wring the black drop out of his remorse. To the broken man only the irony of it came home and it came home so overwhelmingly that, in the bitterness of his spirit, he laughed. He had had a vision of Sabina hanging the sword of fate over his head, hanging it on the thread of her life, a thread which he, in a moment of amazing folly, had cut. But nothing of the sort had happened. Her dying was no tragedy of stealthy murder but the scrapping by nature of a worn-out organism. The memory of past emotion, of grizzly fears, of things tremendous and dire and sinister, passed before him—a procession of wraiths! They had had no foundation in fact, they had risen out of his mind, preposterous things, as preposterous as he. For what had he done? Nothing! Like a puppet, a creature of wire and paste-board, he had pranced and waved his arms. Never—not at the beginning, not during the long years of his servitude, not even when he had tried to burst his bonds, had he been anything but impotent. He had loved Wastralls—to no purpose! He had loved Gray and, while he dreamed, another had been at the wooing; even the crime he would have committed was fallen like a spent arrow at his feet. He had set out to prove himself the man of blood and iron who would force his way, through demon hosts and the flaming swords of heaven, to gain his ends; he who was destined to fight with shadows for a dream. Sabina’s death from heart-weakness after hard work and a heavy supper, was fate’s last jest at his expense. Life had justified his wife’s light estimate of his powers and he, who had believed himself able to control circumstance, had been proved harmless as a tame ranter in a booth. Futile, impotent! The tides of darkness were rising in the wide low room, were rising about the people, hiding all but the watching eyes. Leadville was conscious of coldness. A dark world and cold. Had he ever thought that he was young, that he was strong, that there was no man in Trevorrick who could ’put it across him’? That must have been long ago.