It was a strange companionship in which they went forward through the night, he matching his slow steps to her weariness, with her thin arm, bony and rigid through the cloth sleeve, weighing within his. She was too far spent for talk; they moved in a silence of effort and desperate persistence, with only her harsh and painful breathing sounding in reply to the noises which the darkness evoked upon the veld. Every little while she had to sit down on the ground, and at each such occasion she would make her small excuse.
"I 'll have to take a spell, now," she would say apologetically. "You see, I was walking since before noon."
Then her arm would slide from his and she would sink to earth at his feet, panting painfully, with her head bowed on her bosom and her big hat roofing her over. Thus she would remain motionless for a space till her breath came more easily, and then the hat would tilt up again.
"I could move on a bit, now, if you 'd give me a hand up."
Her courage was a thing he wondered at. Again and again, as the hours spun themselves out, she rose to her feet, groped for his sustaining arm, with her face a pallid disk against the shadow of her hat, and faced the cruel miles. Her feet, in her smart town boots, tormented her without ceasing; her strength was drained from her like blood from an opened vein; and the slowness of their progress protracted the dreary horror of the road that remained to be covered. At times she seemed to talk to herself in whispers between sobbing breaths, and his ear caught hints of words shaped laboriously, but nothing that had meaning. But she uttered no complaint.
At one point where she rested rather longer than usual, he tried to find out what she expected at the journey's end.
"Have you thought what you 'll say," he asked, "when you get home?"
She raised her head slowly.
"I don't know," she answered. "I—I got to take my gruel, I suppose. Whatever it is, I got to take it. It 's up to me."
It was the sum of her wisdom; those free-lances of their sex add it early into the conclusion that saves them the futile effort of evading payment for the fruit they snatch when the world is not looking. After the fun, the adventure, the thrill, comes the gruel, and they have to take it. It is up to them. By the short cut of experience, they reach thus the end and destination of a severe morality.