Would he ever let it go of his own free will? What vain notion was this of a fire!
Now he was muttering absently, as he smoothed the oilskin: “Our harvest, yours and mine. Whatever we went through in the sowing, it was all nothing, wasn’t it, Ky?—just nothing to bringing the harvest home.”
“It wasn’t possible for coming to be worse than going!”
“Borisoff would have said no. But Borisoff only tried one way. We know—Ky and I.” In the pause the eyelids closed over lusterless eyes. It was only while he spoke of the journey that he seemed alive. As she looked again at the face, as blank and cold as a grate without a fire, horror fell upon her lest he should die before Cheviot came back.
Hildegarde’s little store of splinters and shavings had grown into a heap. “If I make kindling for the fire, I deserve to be told—things—don’t I? Besides, then I can tell her—the face.”
“How could you do that?”
She must break it gradually. “Wouldn’t it be possible for me to find her out and tell her?”
He looked at Hildegarde dreamily an instant. “I wonder,” he said.
“I’ll do it, if only you’ll go on—go on.”
He made a faint “no,” with the wild head, smiling dimly. “Any one may have a nightmare. No one has ever told a nightmare, so it didn’t sound absurd. It’s a thing you can’t pass on, fortunately. You can’t recover it even for yourself. Of all those last weeks, only three things stand out clear: one was the day I saw the first fox track in the snow.”