"Davey!" She caught him by the shoulder, shaking him roughly. "I won't let you go! I won't let you die!" she cried.
He fell back from her hands.
She threw herself across him sobbing brokenly. Pressing her face close to his, she leant over him, murmuring and trying to revive him with a breathless agony of grief and tenderness.
"Oh, come back to me! Oh, you will not die. You will not die and leave me," she moaned. "Deirdre, that loves you. Your sweetheart, Davey!"
The cry died away.
In her frenzy she had not heard the door open. Spent with anguish she laid her head against Davey's still one. She felt rather than saw that someone was there in the hut behind her. She turned. Conal was standing in the doorway.
She stared at him. He might have been an aparition, so strange he looked, there in the doorway, with the glimmering night behind him. There was something stricken, aghast, about him. He gazed at her as if the tragic woe of her face were a revelation to him.
"He's dead—and it's you that have killed him, Conal," she said, at length.
"You—love—him, Deirdre?" Conal asked.
So slow and dreary their voices were that they seemed to be talking in their sleep.