With a pang of dread and terror unfelt by him before, he raised his gaunt head with an effort from the uneasy pillow, and looked towards where she lay, with staring, haunted eyes. The window was open a little way at the top, and for fear of the night-chill his fine leopard-skin kaross had been spread over her.... One dimpled, rounded, bare arm lay upon the soft dappled fur, the babyish fingers curled one upon the other. Rosy human tendrils that should never twine again in a mother's hair. Her child, her daughter!... Born of her body, sharing her nature and her sex, soon to be orphaned. For he who could not even lift himself from bed, and drag his body across the floor to cover that lovely babyish arm, would soon be no better protector than the restless ghost that tugged at his heart with its unseen hands. He knew now why it could not rest.
What would become of the child! Another fiery scourge, wielded by the Hand Unseen, bit deep into his shrinking conscience, into his writhing soul. His own act had brought this about. Be a cur, and accuse Destiny, blame Fate, lay the onus upon God, as so many defaulters do--he could not. He lay looking his deed in the foul face until the dawn crept up the sky, and learning how it may be that the sins of their fathers are visited on the children.
He called for ink and paper as soon as the house was awake, and with infinite labour and many pauses to recover spent strength and breath, for he was greedy of life now, for the reason that we know--he wrote a letter home to England, to a relative who was the head of his family, and bore a great historic title--so great that those who spelled it out upon the envelope were half afraid to slip the heated knife under the crested seal. But Bough did it, and opened, and read.
It was not going to be the soft snap he had thought, but it would be good enough. Wires might be pulled from Downing Street that would set the Government at Cape Town working to trace the tall thin Englishman who had travelled up with two waggons from Cape Colony in the company of a child and the woman now dead, and for whose sake he had given up those almighty swell connections. What a fool--what a thundering, juicy, damned fool the man had been! whose gaunt eyes were even now making out the landfall of Kingdom Come through the gathering mists of death.