thing as I see it. Let's leave it."

"Ay, leave it," cried the other, voice and limb shaking, "and life is
short, and the time to die is every time, and if some accident is to
sweep us away to-night, who's to tell him that your death, and your soul
too, isn't on his head?"

"Bother my soul!" said Alec; and yet there was a certain courtesy
expressed in the gentler tone in which he spoke, and what he thought
was, "How much he must have loved her!"

When the fog had vanished, leaving daylight absolute, this scene of the
morning seemed like a dream, and in the evening, as much from curiosity
to see if he could revive its essence again as from a friendly desire to
relieve the overcharged heart of his comrade, he said:

"Tell me about her, Bates. What was she like?"

Bates responded to the question like a man whose heart is beating
against the walls of his silence as a bird beats upon its cage. He spoke
a few words, hardly noticing that he was telling his memories; then the
mask of his self-bound habit was resumed; then again the dignity of his
sorrow found some expression; and still again he would retire into
dumbness, setting the questioner aside slightingly; and when he had
forgotten that he had drawn back within himself some further revealing
would come from him. It was little that he said in all, but language
that has been fused in the furnace of so strong a sorrow and silence has
little of the dross of common speech--the unmeaning, misleading,
unnecessary elements: his veritable memory and thought and feeling were
painted by his meagre tale.