“Very slowly.”

I fingered my pipe and bit hard at its stem.  “Pemaou has played carefully.  He had the woman captured and brought to camp.  The time was not ripe for him to use her, so he let me carry her away.  But he has had me shadowed.  You played well into his hands, for you furnished blankets and provisions.  He had no intention of letting you find us.  We are equal dupes.  I see that I wronged you, monsieur.”

He looked down, his breath laboring.  I could look at him now without recoil, for a common humiliation bound us.  We were white and we had been tricked by a savage.  We sat in heavy silence.

At last Starling spoke dully.  “Why did Pemaou wait so long?”

I gripped my knife the closer.  “That we shall learn when we learn what he has done with the woman.”

He looked up with his jaw shaking.  “Monsieur, we must make haste.”

But I shook my head.  “Monsieur, no.  We must await Pierre.”

The fog was withdrawing.  It was noon, and I rose and made ready a grave for Simon.  I chose a spot under a pine where I had seen the woman sit, and I dug deep as my crude implements would permit.  Then I piled stones on the mound.  The Englishman helped me, and together we said a prayer.  We did not comment till our work was over.  Then Starling looked down at the mound.

“I wonder why he was killed?  The others surrendered.”

I shrugged a trifle bitterly.  “He loved the woman.  It was not her fault.  I doubt that she knew it, and she could not help it.  But it cost him his life, for it made him attempt to carry a forlorn hope.  And she never even knew.  It is suicide to love a woman hopelessly, monsieur.”

It was hideous when we went back to our seats by the ashes.  The sun had come out hot and nauseating, and the flies buzzed horribly.  We tried to crowd down food, but we could not swallow.  We sat and chewed on our despairing thoughts, and hate that was a compound of physical faintness and sick uncertainty rose between us.

The Englishman took a miniature from his pocket and handed it to me.

“She gave it to me herself,” he said.  “With laughter and with kisses, monsieur.”

I tried to wave the picture away, but I had not strength to resist looking.  It was no profile that I saw.  The brown eyes looked full in mine; merry eyes, challenging, fun-crowded, innocent.  There were no sombre shadows there.  There was spirit in plenty, but no sorrow.  White shoulders rose from clouds of pink gauze, and the hair was powdered and pearl-wreathed and piled high in a coronet.  It was not the face of the woman that I knew.  I said so, and returned the portrait to the Englishman.

He could not resist baiting me.  “You do not like it, monsieur?”

I shook my head.  “It is nothing to me.  It is the face of a laughing, trusting, untouched girl.  I have never seen her.”