Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/354

 Philip felt sick. In a low voice he asked, "And he didn't know it?"

"I was to tell him, but nobody's seen him. I'm damned glad he's went away now. I won't have the goddamned dirty job. He'll be crazy . . . crazy as hell."

And then Philip saw her again as he had seen her the night before, lying face down in the snow. . . Krylenko's Giulia.

"She oughtn't to have went up there," Sokoleff was saying. "But she was nuts on him . . . she thought that he was the best guy on earth, and she wanted to hear his speech. . . ." The bearded Slovak spat into the snow. "I guess that was the last thing she ever heard. She died happy. . . . That's better than livin' like this."

And Krylenko had been hiding in Shane's Castle all night while Giulia lay dead in the snow outside.

The sick baby began to cry, and Sokoleff stroked its bare head with a calloused paw covered by black hair.

All at once Philip was happy again; even in the midst of all the misery about him, he was gloriously, selfishly happy, because he knew that, whatever happened, he had known what Krylenko had lost now forever. He thought suddenly, "The jungle at Megambo was less cruel and savage than this world about me." 

To Jason Downes the tragedy in the park of Shane's Castle had only one significance—that it tarnished all the glory of his astonishing return. When the papers appeared in the morning, the first pages were filled