Why I should have killed her I do not know.  That question I now ask myself.  It must be true, true that it is ‘not good’ for man to be alone.  There was a religious sect in the Past which called itself ‘Socialist’:  and with these must have been the truth, man being at his best and highest when most social, and at his worst and lowest when isolated:  for the Earth gets hold of all isolation, and draws it, and makes it fierce, base, and materialistic, like sultans, aristocracies, and the like:  but Heaven is where two or three are gathered together.  It may be so:  I do not know, nor care.  But I know that after twenty years of solitude on a planet the human soul is more enamoured of solitude than of life, shrinking like a tender nerve from the rough intrusion of Another into the secret realm of Self:  and hence, perhaps, the bitterness with which solitary castes, Brahmins, patricians, aristocracies, always resisted any attempt to invade their slowly-acquired domain of privileges.  Also, it may be true, it may, it may, that after twenty years of solitary selfishness, a man becomes, without suspecting it—­not at all noticing the slow stages—­a real and true beast, a horrible, hideous beast, mad, prowling, like that King of Babylon, his nails like birds’ claws, and his hair like eagles’ feathers, with instincts all inflamed and fierce, delighting in darkness and crime for their own sake.  I do not know, nor care:  but I know that, as I drew the cangiar, the basest and the slyest of all the devils was whispering me, tongue in cheek:  ‘Kill, kill—­and be merry.’

With excruciating slowness, like a crawling glacier, tender as a nerve of the touching leaves, I moved, I stole, obliquely toward her through the wall of bush, the knife behind my back.  Once only there was a restraint, a check:  I felt myself held back:  I had to stop:  for one of the ends of my divided beard had caught in a limb of prickly-pear.

I set to disentangling it:  and it was, I believe, at the moment of succeeding that I first noticed the state of the sky, a strip of which I could see across the rivulet:  a minute or so before it had been pretty clear, but now was busy with hurrying clouds.  It was a sinister muttering of thunder which had made me glance upward.

When my eyes returned to the sitting figure, she was looking foolishly about the sky with an expression which almost proved that she had never before heard that sound of thunder, or at least had no idea what it could bode.  My fixed regard lost not one of her movements, while inch by inch, not breathing, careful as the poise of a balance, I crawled.  And suddenly, with a rush, I was out in the open, running her down....

She leapt:  perhaps two, perhaps three, paces she fled:  then stock still she stood—­within some four yards of me—­with panting nostrils, with enquiring face.