Her arms fell, her head lolled forward, and her body lurched against Durham as, with a broken, gasping sigh, she collapsed into a nerveless, jointless thing.
He bent his head and placed his ear to her breast above her heart. There was not the faintest throb, and he took his arm from around her. As he did so she rolled over, her face upturned towards the moon, at which her wide-open eyes stared and her mouth gaped.
The Rider of Waroona was dead!
With bowed head and aching heart Durham bent over her.
All the love of his nature which had lain dormant for so long had gone out to this woman, enfolding her, idealising her, until she became to him the completement of his being, the one incentive for all which was noble within him, the mainspring of his life, the lode-stone of his ambitions. To have won her would have been his dearest and proudest achievement; to have had her love would have made existence for him a never-ending stream of happiness and joy.
As a sun new risen from the night she had come into his life, bringing light and warmth and peace where there had been only coldness and unrest. So he had dreamed of her only that morning; so she had appeared to him only a few hours since when, at her bidding, trusting her, believing in her, loving her, he had turned his back on his duty—betrayed.
Resentment at the treachery warred with his love and tinged his sorrow with bitterness. How she had played with him, tricking him, fooling him, outwitting him—and yet loving him.
The memory of the last fond look of lingering tenderness which had been in her eyes ere he told her Dudgeon was dead came to him. Why had he told her that? Why had he not let her die as she was then, with the gentle side of her nature dominating her, filled with the one soft impulse she perhaps had ever known?
The words had slipped from his tongue almost before he knew, and on the instant there had come back to her the overshadowing influence which had warped her life for evil even before she was born.
By his hand she had died; by his words her last moments had been filled with the blackness of insensate hate.