'Norah, it can't be over yet. We'd only just started.' His face came close to hers. 'It was going to be so heavenly.'
She made to rise but Dick held her fast and crushed his lips on to hers.
What were Dick Ward's motives in kissing the mouth that had just renounced him? He may have trusted to the caress, with the memories it would revive, to soothe what he deemed disordered nerves. He may have hoped to burn away her scruples in a kiss. Or, more simply, the nearness of her body, so soon to be lost to him, may have set his veins a-throb and deprived him of reason. He never had the opportunity to explain.
In the hours that followed Norah was to curse the kiss so negligently accepted—suffered, rather, in weariness and compassion. She felt a great pity for Dick. With his gallant exterior and weakness beneath, he was so ill-equipped for the hand-to-hand fight that is Life. So easily hurt. She wanted in his dark hour to let him down as lightly as she could. If every word of hers, every action, was to breed suffering for the two men who loved her, it seemed ungenerous to forbid anything that might ease the pain. If kissing her was any help....
After all it seemed prudish to balk at a kiss from one who had so recently possessed her. And since it stirred in her no breath of passion, whom could it hurt? So if kissing made parting easier...? And she was weary, mind and body; the interviews with Archie and Dick had taken all her strength; for the moment she was as passive as the dead. What did a kiss more or less matter?
The next moment, she was kneeling by a corpse.
Death, when it comes suddenly, is so incredible, that for some time she worked to bring back consciousness.
At last she desisted and her senses and intelligence confirmed the fact of death; still she took in nothing. Mechanically she closed his eyes and mechanically stayed on her knees, trying to pray for a spirit released on Eternity all unready. But she would have been less astonished, when she opened her eyes at last, to see him standing there gay and immaculate with a smile on his face and a word of love on his tongue, than to find him lying stiff and contorted in the disorder of violent death. Was it believable that the mouth, which a matter of seconds before had so feverishly sought hers, was set in that grimace as long as any flesh was on it? That the body, whose warmth she felt against her heart, was growing colder, never to be warm again ... unless putrefaction engenders heat?
To occupy her hands she lifted his rifle, playing with it aimlessly. What deadly toys men had! She turned the weapon in her hands, half opened the breech.
It was still in her grasp when she reached the camp, where Changalilo took it from her to clean. She felt that henceforward life would consist of minute, valueless acts like handing a rifle to a native, changing a skirt, sitting down on a chair. Nothing would ever matter again. 'All things are full of labour: man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.'