Or is this my present state of mind nothing but a hiatus between deed and thought. If I could speak to her, and hear her speak again, I’d know. She waits for my words, I am silent, night is approaching when I must take stones and hide the dead body of the man I killed. I see him fall, before my eyes, like a tree falling, slowly at first, then in sudden collapse. His outstretched arm flings the rifle away; the fingers of his outstretched arm extend themselves; to close and grasp the moss where he falls. I never knew dead men’s eyes stared like his; it was foolish of me to imagine that dead men’s eyes closed when death struck them blind; death has fingers for the heart alone; how many stags I’ve seen with glazing eyes, and tapped their eyeballs with the blade of a knife, before I bled them. I should have known. I’ll close his eyes, when I hap him in stones to keep him from the hoodie and the eagle. Upon the flat hill-top, under the sky, with my fingers on the eyelids of the man I killed, I’ll surely know then what I am.

Then I can speak, and Terry will answer me. I pray for horror to compass me. Come, night, dark minister of time.

It is only two days since I waited at the door of the cave and the sheep and men went past. When all had gone and were lost in the west I spied every corner of the country, sweeping it yard by yard with the telescope. Night came soon. We slept ill; the rifle lay beside me all night. In the morning I took it in my hands.

‘I’m going for a beast, sheep or deer or goat, I care not which,’ I told Terry.

‘Is it safe?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Safe?’ I laughed. ‘Fully as safe as dying of hunger here, like rats in a trap, Terry.’

‘Let me tidy up the cave first,’ she said. ‘Then it’ll be ready for us when we come back.’

‘But you’re not coming,’ I told her.

She nodded her head vehemently.

‘Terry,’ I went on, ‘you must attend to me—’

‘And let you go out of my sight, maybe never to come again!’ She cried frantically. ‘I know there’s danger, Hugh. I can see it in your eyes, your face. I feel it in my heart. Look at me! look at me and say there’s no danger—you can’t hide it! I’m going with you! Oh, Hugh, if anything happened to you—’