Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/339

 corner, he saw that near the stable lay the remnants of a fire which had burnt to a heap of embers. His foot touched something that was wet and slippery. He looked down to discover a great stain of black on the snow. For a moment he stared at the stain, fascinated, and suddenly he knew what it was. It was a great stain of blood.

In the distance, among the trees, he discerned a light, and after a moment he discovered a little group of men. . . three or four. . . carrying a lantern, which they held high from time to time, as if searching for something. And then, all at once, as he moved forward again, he almost stepped upon a woman who lay in the snow at the entrance to the rotting arbor covered with the vines of the dying wistaria. She lay face down with one arm above her head in a posture that filled him for a moment with a sense of having lived through this same experience before, of having seen this same woman lying face down. . . dead. . . for she was unmistakably dead. He knelt beside her, and, turning the body on its side, he remembered suddenly. She lay like the black virgin they had found dead across the path in the tall grass at Megambo. . . the one they had left to the leopards.

Trembling, he peered at the white face in the moonlight. The woman was young, and across one side of the face there was a little trickle of blood that came from a hole in the temple. She was dressed in rags, and her feet were wrapped in rolls of sacking. She was the wife or daughter of some striker. It occurred to him suddenly that there was something pitifully lonely in the sight of the body left there, forgotten, by the embers in the dead park; it had the strangest effect