He hears her and looks up. "Ah, Gudrun, is that you? Good girl, good girl!"
She sinks on to her knees, and moans and rocks herself; and then she looks at his closed eyes and says to her: "Mistress, may I? It can't harm you!"
She nods her head wearily; she is fanning awkwardly with her left hand, and she says with her tired, tender voice: "Gudrun wants to say good-by, dear!"
He opens his eyes, and for a moment the charm of his rare smile returns. The girl stoops and leaves a kiss upon his forehead, and then rushes away and flings herself down on the long lush grass, that is never cut, under a big chestnut-tree.
He looks at her and lifts her hand to his lips: "Always a big heart, always a great little woman [with a groan]! and now I am to lose you, and it is the best thing could happen to you. Ay, there's the sting,—leave you to some brute, that is my punishment. O little one! don't you think too hardly of me," he talks with effort; "I meant to be better than I was to you. You'll never find another man love you as I did; remember that, and forget all the rest if you can. You have forgotten all, I might have known you would! Where am I drifting to? No man ever came back to say. Do you believe in hell [eagerly], do you believe in it?"
She looks at him pityingly, with a flash of past energy in the lift of her head, and a curl of scorn on her pale lips: "The hell of the priests or parson? No, I do not. Is that worrying you? Don't you let it, old man, don't you let it! Wherever you are going, whatever after existence your poor troubled soul is fighting its way to, it is not to their hell!"
The girl has come back and taken up her former position, and fans steadily, for the flies are gathering in greater numbers every hour. The veranda seems airless and close, and uncanny with unseen things; the doctor comes and goes; the servants peep out, and the hours seem to hold many hours in their embrace. She seems to live all her life over again. Things she has forgotten completely come vividly back to her. An old Maori man, who used to sell sweet potatoes and quaint ring-shells for napkin rings to the Pakeha lady in Tauranga Bay, floats before her inward vision as tangible as if he were next her; and a soldier servant, she can hear his voice, he used to sing as he pipe-clayed,—
"But kaipoi te waipero, Kaipoi te waiena;
For Rangatira Sal, Bob Walker sold his pal,
But he's now at the bottom o' the harbor!"