He faced the issue squarely. Suppose he surrendered to the love, which still impregnated his tormented being, and took Norah back, what peace would there be for either? Could he ever for a moment forget her character as this blinding moment had revealed it? Could he ever trust her word? When she spoke to him he would divine a hidden sense; when she kissed him he would see a lure. He would have sold his manhood for deception and a mockery.
No, once he had rescued her from the danger of the moment, he must break through the net that entangled him. The world would be bare enough without Norah, without the farm, without mankind's major compensations for living—love and work.
Even suicide was inadmissible. If he killed himself here, what would happen to Norah?
Some heavy drops of rain recalled him to the work that faced him. He must fetch the hoe. If he met Norah, he need not speak to her. Sometime he must tell her what he had decided, that could wait. There was now a man to be buried, a raft to be built, a journey to be begun. Plenty for one man to do, with fever. Then he'd have to go to the first Boma and give them a story of Ward's death. Unless, of course, Norah betrayed him. That, and anything, was now possible.
He found it difficult to raise himself from the heap of masonry on which he was sitting. His limbs seemed to have stiffened and he shook with ague. Laboriously he dragged brushwood and creepers near the corpse and put a match to the heap.
Then without looking round, he walked heavily to the camp. The unsteady illumination of lightning showed him his path."
CHAPTER VIII
That afternoon when Norah had helped Archie down the hillside, where the work of transporting the logs was in process and where she had made her difficult offer of reconciliation, it had not been easy to persuade him to take his fever to bed.
She had at last overcome his conviction that the carriers could not be left alone by promising that she herself would watch the work. So she had spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon walking behind the gang in their slow passage between hillside and lake, until the full number of logs that Archie needed to build the rafts lay ranged on the shore.