opaline eyes were covered with film, he gasped painfully, a foam of
blood on his lips and a stream of blood coursing down his face; a
quiver passed over him again; then his head rested lifeless on his
knees. She touched his shattered horns, his clotted wool, tenderly.

"Why did you set him to fight?" she said with an indignation which
choked her voice. "It was vile. He was younger than the other, and
knew less."

Those who had won laughed. Those who had lost cursed him again; he
had disgraced his _branca_. They would flay him, and put him in the
cauldron over the wood fire, and would curse him even whilst they
picked his bones for a white-livered spawn of cowards; a son of a
thrice-damned ewe.

The girl knew that was what they do. She laid his battered head
gently down upon the turf, and poured the water out of her cup; her
eyes were blind with tears; she could not give him back his young
life, his zest in his pastoral pleasures, his joy in cropping the
herbage, his rude loves, his merry gambols, his sound sleep, his
odorous breath.

He had died to amuse and excite the ugly passions of men, as, if he
had lived longer, he would, in the end, have died to satisfy their
ugly appetites.

She looked at his corpse with compassion, the tears standing in her
eyes; then she turned away, and as she went saw that her poor ragged
clothes were splashed here and there with blood, and that her arms
and hands were red with blood: she had not thought of that before;